Piracy of Japanese games and anime has tripled over the past 3 years. Government acknowledges need to expand legitimate global distribution channels

By piracy do they mean zoomie zoom zooms streaming on ad filled sites with buffering lmao

As a brokie I doubt I will ever stop pirating media. The cost of living only rises overtime as salaries tend to stagnate. Tariffs in the US destroyed a lot of hobbies already like beyblades and figures. Legit distribution can't save anything imo.

I don't know why the producers don't just put all their anime on Youtube for free with ads available worldwide outside Japan. That has to make more money than licensing out to middle men, right?? Maybe not idk

So how are Western companies allowed to operate, if they're keeping all the money and not returning anything back to Japan?

I hope that we one day get to see a world where outdated concepts such as trademarks and copyright no longer exists. They served a purpose in the 1800s and early 1900s to give an incentive for people to be innovative but it has no place in the modern world

@NS2D are you part of the "delete all ip law" movement then? im starting to like that movement but i hate that elon musk is part of it

@deg I've never heard of that movement before but I've always had the opinion that human creativity shouldn't be copyrighted. At this point it does more harm to actual innovation which is why I think it has outlived the purpose that it once had, and now serve as a detriment rather than something that increases innovation overall

Theoretically speaking, let's say those companies had their profits without the "piracy" issue, how much would realistically go back to the animators and artists of the anime? Aren't most of them relatively poor?

I don't know why the producers don't just put all their anime on Youtube for free with ads available worldwide outside Japan. That has to make more money than licensing out to middle men, right?? Maybe not idk

@deg I've never heard of that movement before but I've always had the opinion that human creativity shouldn't be copyrighted. At this point it does more harm to actual innovation which is why I think it has outlived the purpose that it once had, and now serve as a detriment rather than something that increases innovation overall

@NS2D IP law is valuable, but it has been extended too far beyond reasonable protection to the point that it does more to hinder creativity than encourage it. It shouldn't be eliminated, but severely reduced back to expiry within a lifetime. Currently it does more to serve large organizations/properties maximizing profit with minimal input, whereas shorter copy protections would protect new creative endeavors while preventing them from cashing in for a century without making something new.

@valico thats a good compromise to the whole delete ip law movement ye just make the ip rights expiration shorter

@deg they originally were like 30 years of protection in the US, but, if I recall, corps like Disney lobbied to have them extended and now Mickey Mouse is still protected nearly a century later.

no, most definitely not.

an ad-supported view on YT is worth about $0.001 (0.1 cents).

a CR sub is $8, let's say $3 of that go to CR themselves. that leaves $5 for the rights holders. and let's say the subscriber watches 100 episodes a month, each episode would get a $0.05 share, which would make an episode viewed through a CR sub 50 times more profitable than an episode viewed on YT with ads.

even if we assume a 90% piracy rate, it still makes more sense to keep the content behind a paywall.

(also, Youtube is still a middle man. they keep almost half the ad revenue.)

Producers and their representatives always complain about piracy to maximize their profits, even if they already make large enough profits.

So you're telling me I can write a batch file to copy One Punch Man 3 a few hundred thousand times locally to bankrupt Bandai?

Have you seen any credible "teeny tiny" numbers out there, or is this just something you want to believe because it supports your "Western Companies Bad" narrative? Because what I've seen is this:


Japan tried this with Daisuki awhile back, but found that "The site also couldn't compete with the big money being paid by Crunchyroll, Funimation, and later Amazon for exclusive streaming rights."
Also, it's dubious to assume that Japan getting directly involved with foreign markets would reduce prices. Look at physical media -- Japanese domestic releases cost far more than licensed releases elsewhere, and virtually every time Japanese companies have tried to directly sell discs in overseas markets (Bandai Visual, Aniplex USA, PonyCan USA), those discs have cost considerably more than the average release by local licensees.

How about not region lock almost everything, and make international payment available? It's so frustrating not being able to purchase something directly with my debit card and instead I have to buy some manga app coins from a local Japanese convenience store which requires a Japanese account. And you wonder why people pirate. No, official localization takes forever to come out, so that's out of the question when I want to keep up with all the manga I'm reading.

I import my manga volumes from Japan because the localized version here just isn't as good.

@Zalis They pay a teeny tiny licensing fee, and then steal all the profits after that on the Western end for themselves. It's very cheap to import anime.

Have you seen any credible "teeny tiny" numbers out there, or is this just something you want to believe because it supports your "Western Companies Bad" narrative? Because what I've seen is this:


Japan tried this with Daisuki awhile back, but found that "The site also couldn't compete with the big money being paid by Crunchyroll, Funimation, and later Amazon for exclusive streaming rights."
Also, it's dubious to assume that Japan getting directly involved with foreign markets would reduce prices. Look at physical media -- Japanese domestic releases cost far more than licensed releases elsewhere, and virtually every time Japanese companies have tried to directly sell discs in overseas markets (Bandai Visual, Aniplex USA, PonyCan USA), those discs have cost considerably more than the average release by local licensees.

As a brokie I doubt I will ever stop pirating media. The cost of living only rises overtime as salaries tend to stagnate. Tariffs in the US destroyed a lot of hobbies already like beyblades and figures. Legit distribution can't save anything imo.

@rohan121 So you would rather steal then just go for a job? Minimum wage in US is $7.25 per hour. A Crunchyroll subscription is $9.99 / month. You can literally make that up with 2 hours of work and have change left.

"Wow, imagine if all hese people who watch our stuff for free paid instead, we would be rich!"

1 - Bold of you to assume people would pay for 90% of that mid shit
2 - We all know piracy is not a threat to anything, otherwise the videogame industry would have died two decades ago
3 - You're rich already, stop being bitches and make good anime

signed - someone who just dumped 250€ on 15 Ghibli blu-rays and some extras

@Deathko
Sadly, the Japanese love to eat up the thousandth OP Isekai loser and the same repeated school romance with copy-pasted character tropes. Which end up being the most bought novels and manga, leading to anime adaptations which consequently end up being the most bought Bluray's of that anime season, resulting in more of that stuff. At this point, I doubt the spam of those two things will ever stop. From the slop writers pov, why would they make something original if they can just copy-paste full well knowing their fellow slop enjoyers will eat it up?