Hollywood steps up anime piracy war and battles domain-hopping evaders

https://torrentfreak.com/hollywood-steps-up-anime-piracy-war-and-battles-domain-hopping-evaders-230707/

by picture • 3 years ago

55 73 3 years ago

jchw3• 3 years ago

Of all the anti-piracy wars, I feel like this one is probably the most viscerally futile. Anime may have become substantially more mainstream than it was in the past, but it just has a huge culture around piracy and fansubs that is not going to be easy to shake; this is especially true as the main legal venues for anime consolidate and target primarily mainstream audiences, leaving a lot of the older fans disillusioned with purchasing anime goods outside of direct imports from Japan.

I am not a huge anime watcher, but it's hard to think of a fan base more obsessed with cleaner rips, better encoding, etc. and a ton of people in the scene are simply not motivated by the prospect of making money.

I sincerely do not believe you can turn a substantial amount of the people pirating anime into e.g. Crunchyroll subscribers. I'll believe it when I see it.

(Of course, mentioning Crunchyroll is, in itself, kind of funny: owing to just how rooted the modern foreign anime fan scene is rooted in piracy, it began as a website for pirating anime.)

mcpackieh8• 3 years ago

I sincerely do not believe you can turn a substantial amount of the people pirating anime into e.g. Crunchyroll subscribers.

Yeah, not a chance. I periodically check what Crunchyroll has available, and it's always abysmal. Virtually nothing I'm interested in watching is ever on Crunchyroll. I don't think my tastes are very obscure, they don't even have Bubblegum Crisis, Patlabor or Macross right now. So even if they took away all possibilities for me to pirate anime, I still wouldn't subscribe to Crunchyroll.

yieldcrv2• 3 years ago

Its straight up scary how much quality anime is jettisoned off of all streaming services and almost the internet entirely!

A lot of the highest quality and revered things have owners that are too comfortable with their pre-streaming syndication options, and are too expensive to license.

This is a dystopia, piracy is definitely the way.

I always have to check that I’m not being a hipster about it, and I’ve shown lots of 20 year olds some older stuff and they’re all enamored with it and can see how their current options are functionally trash.

(But the silver lining is that hot women are into anime now. Its not a counterculture thing for maladjusted people and its great to share this experience so casually)

jncfhnb3• 3 years ago

As someone who watches a few shoes per year, I haven’t heard of any of these. Wikipedia says bubblegum crisis is an 8 episode one off from over 30 years ago. I’m amused at your definition of obscure.

omoikane• 3 years ago

Virtually nothing I'm interested in watching is ever on Crunchyroll

Curiously, Crunchyroll had virtually everything that we wanted to fansub back then. Their licensing coverage was sufficiently wide that a lot of us just stopped fansubbing, because everything had been "crunchyrolled".

hakfoo• 3 years ago

Much more than with many other media, anime/manga collections are a signal of personal allegiance and preference. For example, I can still recall the bitterness in the early US One Piece fandom when it seemed like Naruto and Bleach got all the marketing, the high-quality dubs, and merchandise galore, while they had to suffer through one of the most atrocious dubs in modern history and a manga release schedule that was 40 volumes behind Japan. I still have the tokens of this-- some untranslated copies found in secondhand shops and from fan-forum group buys, terrible figures, artbooks purchased at conventions long before the translated versions existed.

Bookshelves full of print manga will not disappear for anything short of a house fire. The same with owned DVDs, or properly maintained pirate content. They remain an ongoing symbol of the commitment to these franchises. In a way that would make sense to mainstream marketers, it's more like sports memorabelia-- keeping the cards/jerseys/etc. of their favourite baseball players from their childhood-- than a bookshelf full of novels.

Conversely, anything you consume on a "subscription service" basis will go poof when some MBA sees a KPI trending in the wrong direction. Can you really build the same anchored relationship with that sort of fragile foundation?

mike50• 3 years ago

Macross has been in licensing hell since the VHS days if I recall correctly.

ThrowawayR2• 3 years ago

And I thought I was an old fogey. That's like griping that today's broadcast television networks don't show the Andy Griffith Show[1], Leave It To Beaver, Mr. Ed., and the original Star Trek.

[1] Which modern gamers may at least minimally know since Barney from the Half-Life series got his name from one of its characters.

charcircuit• 3 years ago

but it just has a huge culture around piracy and fansubs

Simulcasting killed most of the culture around fansubs since pirate groups could now just steal both the video and subs from crunchyroll, amazon, hidive, etc. There is no longer a point in taking a Japanese release and packaging it up for English audiences when the English release happens at pretty much the same time.

Nyan6• 3 years ago

Your experience may be slightly out of date.

Fansubbers these days are a tiny shadow of that they used to be. The vast majority of anime piracy these days consists of ripping official streams, which include subtitles.

Of course, if you're into older shows, you'll find many to be missing on the mainstream streaming platforms, and will often need to resort to piracy and fansubs to get that. But as anime becomes more mainstream, those interested in older stuff become a smaller slice of the market.

Also, due to more mainstream adoption, those interested in "cleaner rips, better encoding, etc" are dwindling. Whilst these people are still out there, you'll find the vast majority of people are perfectly happy with low quality streaming sites (also worth pointing out that these streams still offer vastly better video quality than what you typically got in the 90s).

Enforcement wise, I doubt they're targeting the hardcore fans - they're going after the mainstream, which is a big slice of the market.

pierat• 3 years ago

Your experiences are absolutely out of date.

For example, the recent (6th season) of JoJo, are all sorts of references that the fansubbers can make from the original material, but the corporate subbers aren't legally able to.

In fact, the corpo-subs are considered degraded and garbage, compared to a fansub. There aren't 'sensibilities' to maintain, nor is there corporate rights etc to hold up. And frankly, we make better!

If you want a comparison between corporate and fansubs, look no further than the book and movie of Ready Player One. That's a fair comparison.

creamyhorror4• 3 years ago

Fansubbers these days are a tiny shadow of that they used to be. The vast majority of anime piracy these days consists of ripping official streams, which include subtitles.

Yep, like another commenter says, the scene got Crunchyrolled 2010-2012ish and many subbers retired.

It's funny (frankly outright amazing) how Crunchyroll, originally a major pirate streaming site, managed to cross the chasm by striking legal agreements with content owners, and for a large amount of content to boot. It might have been possible only for a small window (before the real rise of global online media platforms), during which the owners wanted to gain the global online audience and didn't have as much familiarity with building online international distribution channels. Can't imagine moves like that happening any more in our climate.

stuckinhell2• 3 years ago

Fansubbers have been making a very large resurgence lately because of "localization" being introduced to anime, which has been inserting everything from out of date memes, politics, and very poor translations.

The translations can be so poor at times, it may invert the meaning of the joke or phrase.

mcpackieh8• 3 years ago

Kind of strange they're going after these literally who sites instead of you know where. I guess because these are commercial? Or has the most popular public tracker for anime somehow escaped their notice?

jchw3• 3 years ago

Nyaa has been targeted, though. It's jumped several domains in the past, and in one of the most insane measures I've ever seen, I recall a time where linking it on Twitter was full-on banned. Maybe it's less targeted now because it's simply proven to be too evasive to find any good pressure points, or perhaps it's just in the back burner after previous failed attempts.

(I don't see a point in not mentioning it by name, but maybe I'm missing something.)

serf• 3 years ago

(I don't see a point in not mentioning it by name, but maybe I'm missing something.)

you're missing how even more attention towards something that has had legal troubles in the past might add fuel to the fire?

or, from the opposite side of the aisle : you're missing how rebroadcasting piracy sources might hinder the anime industry?

feels obvious to me, from either angle.

mcpackieh8• 3 years ago

I know at least a few people on HN are copyright maximalists, so I hesitate to mention things like this by name in mixed company.

teddyh• 3 years ago

According to <https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread/anime>, I assume that the site in question is <https://nyaa.si/>.

Nyan6• 3 years ago

It's jumped several domains in the past

One thing to note is that there's actually two Nyaa sites, so it's important to not confuse the two.

The original jumped several domains, and closed down in May 2017 (last domain was nyaa.se). The "current Nyaa", nyaa.si, is a clone site that launched shortly after, and hasn't changed any domains.

With the original, I recall the domains jumped were linked to various legislative changes in Europe, with the shutdown in 2017 likely due to similar reasons.

Nyan6• 3 years ago

A possibility might be that the bigger sites have paid more attention to opsec, and are harder to take down, whilst smaller players may be easier to intimidate.

Current Nyaa (nyaa.si) has been targeted [https://torrentfreak.com/mpa-lawyers-are-trying-to-shut-down...], but efforts haven't been successful so far.

I guess because these are commercial?

Highly unlikely - it's not like rights holders get anything regardless of commercial status. Also, Nyaa runs ads on their NSFW site, so it's commercial in that respect.

Animats2• 3 years ago

From 2013-2017, Japan had a site, Daisuki.net, which looked like a pirate site, but was funded by the Cool Japan Fund, a venture fund run by the government and some of the big banks.[1] The government's goal was to promote Japanese culture; they were worried abut competition from K-pop.

Sadly, that site is gone.

[1] https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/files/press_141030-1.pdf

creamyhorror4• 3 years ago

Ah yes, Daisuki. I don't recall it ever gaining that much traction, probably because of the limited amount of anime on it. Government policy ebbs and flows with the short-term success of its experiments, as usual. But I don't see how it could have worked economically, given that anime is expensive to produce and content owners want a good ROI.

In contrast, hallyu/K-drama's cross-border grip remains as strong as ever; they just keep pumping it out for a hungry global audience who'll stream it (paid or pirated). There seems to be a fundamental difference in the appetite for it - K-media probably appeals to more people on the whole, you don't even need the government to subsidise it for global consumption - and thus in the economics of it.

edit: That said, MUSE Asia somehow managed to secure licenses for a good amount of previous and ongoing releases and streams it for free in much of Asia on Youtube. So maybe there's some content subsidising still going on, or at least MUSE has worked out some free-content model with owners that might be economically sustainable.

astrange5• 3 years ago

Anime is not expensive to produce for what it is. It's amazing how much smaller the budgets for anime are compared to universally awful looking and poorly animated Western shows.

The main problem is that the amount of anime that can be produced at one time just isn't that much, because there's only so many studios to do it. And the best studio of all Kyoto Animation hasn't recovered from most of their staff literally being killed by a terrorist attack a few years ago.

(Sometimes Western animation tries to make fake anime; there's a Superman TV show that just started. They are somehow completely unable to do this. It's worse than what Japanese children could do.)

justinclift2• 3 years ago

It'll be so (ironically?) funny if AI becomes able to practically generate good quality stories (along with the matching generated video and audio / subs), after being trained exclusively on Manga and Anime content.

That'd all be legal too, as the Japanese gov has categorically stated that copyright doesn't exist on the source material when used to train AI.

Not sure if there would even need to be royalties payable for generated Anime characters that happen to look like existing IP.

Nintendo would absolutely go bonkers. I kind of can't wait. :D

kmeisthax2• 3 years ago

The only thing Japan has done is adopt the TDM exceptions that the EU has. In the US the only certainty we have is that text-to-image AI art generation is not a creative process and thus does not accrue copyright on its own.

That being said - and, again, sticking with US law - if your AI generated an anime character that looks like an existing character, and that character was either in the training set or described in your prompt, then you'd have an open and shut case. Otherwise it'd be considered a happy accident. That's also the standard for non-AI art as well. It's called "access and substantial similarity."

I fully expect Nintendo to privately tell all their licensed developers not to use AI art generators. Actually, boycotting is probably going to be the most effective solution from the perspective of human artists who don't want their job being turned into SEO keyword stuffing[0]. While AI art proponents think that progress is inevitable, the reality of it is that in order for the AI generators to "get better", we need bigger models and more research, both of which are resting on exponential price curves. So if human artists as a class decide they aren't going to use AI, then AI will always be relegated to "second best", even if we can always finetune on those human artists' work.

[0] No seriously I think this is what human artists actually fear. It's one thing to point out that they're being put on a treadmill to train the bot that will replace them. But a lot of artists seem to hate the idea of working with a text-to-image art generator, even if that art generator was trained on ethically sourced data. They feel as if their fun has been taken away.

justinclift2• 3 years ago

Hmmm, that's not really what seems to be the case, as widely reported about a month ago.

eg: https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-...

dontlaugh• 3 years ago

If you’re in the games industry, you’ve been told by your workplace (or heard from someone who has been told) to not use AI generation for anything that may ship because of the risk of complicated copyright infringement.

rootw0rm• 3 years ago

Honestly, I'm pretty sure that some good shows are already around LLM levels of focus/creativity. I love Bleach, but there are several plot lines where there's a great story that ends abruptly, never to be revived again. The story just happily meanders along like an LLM trying it's best to give you exactly what you want =)

ronsor• 3 years ago

I give it 12-24 months before AI can generate entire anime episodes.

stuckinhell2• 3 years ago

AI is already being heavily adopted in Japan for animation and anime. For now, it's used as part of workflows that can get cleaned up. However you can start seeing 3d generated models with AI filters and AI animations increasing in the background of many new Anime.

didibus• 3 years ago

I'm subbed to Funimation and now Crunchyroll, and their apps are so terrible, that I still often use an unofficial streaming website instead.

Only when anime is on Netflix do I much prefer to watch it there.

Once again, piracy is a response to lack of competition in delivery and publishing. If the user experience was better on paid services than on free sketchy online websites (you'd think it's a low bar), I'm sure a lot of the piracy would go away.

Hollywood steps up anime piracy war and battles domain-hopping evaders

Related Stories