The reason why sites like hotfile are used by people who redistribute content is that they can make money from affiliate systems when users pay for premium accounts to access the content with out the download speed throttling or download size restrictions.
The irony of the situation is that it's unprofitable to license anime for the US precisely because the fansubbing community already distributes "free" copies, and most anime-fans consume the majority of their content that way.
What's even more ironic, is that no one is willing to pay for poor quality subtitles, which is frequently the case with the ones provided by companies.
...which is precisely what is meant when one says "there's no market for this". At this point, content owners have the choice of either being permissive, or clamping down on the community using IP laws.
The interesting part is they could just donate a generous amount to the community in exchange for the use of their translations in the "official" release.
It's a win-win from what i see it.
Community gets funding they don't have to pay for another translation and make a little more profit.
The thing is, the fansubbed product is better. The user experience is as good as with Kindle books, and better than any commercial video service - the translation quality of modern internet streaming services like Crunchyroll is actually good enough to compete with fansubs. But the video quality isn't, and I can't stream on my commute.
For those not in the know, the difference is incredible. Contrast a DVD release with crappy bitmapped, two-colour subtitles with interlaced video to a file with nice anti-aliased subs, often more contextual information/better translations, and in a small file size (thanks to a modern codec[1]) and a mobile-device-ready format to boot. There really is no contest.
To put it another way, it wouldn't surprise me if many people end up watching fansubbed versions of shows they already own just because it's better and more convenient.
[1]For proof of this just see VLC's release notes for all the improvements we have thanks to anime fans pushing adoption of modern technologies.
I know many anime fans who have rows of shrinkwrapped DVDs on their walls - they'll buy them to support the creators, but the fansub quality is much better.
Well, no. Fansubs are usually very poor quality translation. Not only do hey leave English mistakes in the subs, but they leave half of the stuff in Japanese (chan, sempai, sensei, etc.) because those are words their audience understand anyway.
Well, sorry but "sensei" just means "doctor", "professor" or "teacher" depending on the context, it's not some mysterious magic title that can't be translated.
Translation is hard. Honorifics end up being a place where fansubbers just give up.
On the other hand, consider a series in which character A calls character B "B kun" while character C calls character B "B sempai".
Most of the time it doesn't matter enough to try and bother with a good way of translating that, but sometimes it comes up in the plot, perhaps several episodes into the show.
Choosing to leave those untranslated isn't anything new, nor unique to fansubs. The Early '90s AnimeEigo translation of the Aa! Megamisamaa OVA left them untranslated in some cases, with a note on the top of the screen.
Yes, fansubs could use better copy-editing, but so could some professional subs. The biggeset offender is that I have seen several instances of English loan-words left in their rōmaji spelling rather than their proper English spellings in commercial subtitles.
Some of the higher production value translations will go for a very literal subtitle translation and a highly figurative dub translation. An example of this is the "Tenchi Forever" restaurant scene translation where The dub is roughly:
Waiter: "Would you like coffee after your meal?"
Diner: "No"
and the subtitle is
Waiter: "Would you like tea with that"
Diner: "Yes"
(That one particularly sticks out in my mind since if you watch with sub+dub at the same time you have someone speaking "no" with a subtitle of "yes")
Idunno, sometimes the translations do lose some context. I've lost interest in anime since then, but when I was younger I saw a fansub of Princess Mononoke before I saw the official sub... and yeah, leaving some of the monster's names untranslated made more sense. Calling the creatures the Deer God and the Demon instead of Tatagami and Shishigami created a bunch of connotative problems. AFAIK, those aren't even real words in Japanese, so translating them wasn't necessary - they were names, titles, not things needing translating. By translating Tatagami into "demon" they created the impression that the beast was evil instead of angry and cursed. By calling the Shishigami the "Deer God" it created the impression that it was the god of the Deer instead of the god of the forest itself.
The folks watching it with me found the Disney sub confusing when I had no trouble keeping up with the original.
So there's a balancing act, and I'll agree that otakus are too quick to leave stuff untranslated, commercial translators are too agressive at picking a word that doesn't fit.
I disagree. If the legitimate source becomes easier to acquire, people will migrate. For example, I always youtubed/torrented music. I finally got Spotify and it completely replaced it because it's easier to access. Sure I'm "losing" $10 per month that I could otherwise save, but this service does everything for me. Indexing, discovery, and syncing.
Give me a way of watching what i like the moment it comes out (not 3 years later) and I'll pay for it.
Otherwise I'll do whatever it takes to get it.
There's still series that I watched and enjoyed over 5 years ago that are still not translated and sold outside of japan so should i waste my tine waiting for a miracle because of the Berne Convention?
If the market is not willing to do it the community will plain and simple.
The problem is at the moment the community is a lot better at offering what people want then any company.
You said "non-US copyright" and "legal", while the Berne Convention, of which the US is a signatory, states that copyright of any signatory nation extends to all signatory nations as if it were under national copyright in each nation.
So you should care, as he/she was pointing out a false statement in your original post and what you claim to be legal is actually illegal. Whether you change your use of fansub animes is really besides the point.
Some people neither know nor care about the legal situation. If what they want is available legally when they want it they'll get it via that route. And if it isn't they'll just pirate it.
Anime communities are pretty strict in asking people to buy licensed DVDs and to take down torrents for series that receive a US release.
I guess it is. Seems to be meant to protect potential revenues of a local show in the international market for the length of the copyright.
However the flaw is that copyright still doesn't negate the old saying of "strike when the iron is hot" and no copyright length will protect your potential revenue if you don't move fast enough.
I guess I should find another example of non copyright work although even doujinshi which i would argue should be considered original work due to the time and effort of the author are considered illegal since they use copyrighted elements.
Copyright prevents derivative works and stifles creativity. Just look at the UK comic scene all the comics are original works no doujinshi at all and i suspect its because copyright is too strict and you wouldn't get a table if you wanted to sell one the organizers of the event would be afraid of being sued.
What should they learn? That one can not rely on cloud hosting?
Every hosting service can and will be used for copyright infringement - Google's Blogspot is a nice example. They host(ed) hundreds of "piracy" blogs (and took them down on DMCA notice, like Hotfile/MU did), so do I have to fear my blog being taken down because some idiots sue Google?
The only thing that protects me/my data from this scenario is that Google is Too Big To Be Sued.
The "cloud": Some one else's hard drive which you cant physically access, can only access with an internet connection, and is wide open to the abuses of authorities.
"What should they learn? That one can not rely on cloud hosting?"
Correct. Only an utter mug trusts and / or "relies" the cloud. Great for utility, but trust? Secure? Rely? No. Never. At the very, very least users should back up anything valuable saved on a "cloud". No, you cannot rely on "cloud" hosting. Use it by all means, dont rely on it though.
"The only thing that protects me/my data from this scenario is that Google is Too Big To Be Sued."
No copies of your own?
After Mega and so forth, if you keep data on a cloud, and a government takes it away, but you have no back up of it, its you own fault. While I might understand a normal mug users being caught like this, a reader of HN should be literally de-HNed for being in such a situation. If a hacker does not accept the compromise of the cloud, then there is no hope.
For the sake of mere mortals who are not geeks or hackers, I think its about time cloud providers were made to state the clear limitations and risks of their services. Ordinary users trust these services, and such ordinary people can lose very valuable, deeply personal things like family photos. A cloud service can be a part of a backup strategy, but never ever the whole thing.
The cloud is a trade off between free or cheap easy utility, and reliability and security. Know that, then choose and act appropriately.
> What should they learn? That one can not rely on cloud hosting?
For a start, yes. Never trust data solely to a 3rd party and never assume data hosted solely by a single 3rd party is going to be reliably available. It doesn't matter how redundant their systems are internally, to an external user they are still a single point of failure.
The other thing to learn is that if you use cloud hosting avoid the ones that openly attract (or are know to turn a blind eye to where-ever possible) unlicensed copyright covered material. Also avoid most things that are "free" which includes ad-sponsored upload+distribute sites - they always attract iffy content often could not survive without the add revenue from it. Those that offer to pay you for impressions are even worse on all these counts. You can't expect more than what you pay for, and to be honest unless you are careful about your provider selection you can't reliably expect what you have paid for half the time...
Most of the people who really are affected by the provider shutdowns are "ordinary" people who may occasionally download stuff from youtube but don't know much else about computing. They just see the facade of the hosters and don't know about the "back side" - and when the fuck-up happens, they're caught cold.
"We", as in "tech-savy population", know about SPOFs, backups and such - but not an everyday person.
There is nothing much we can do about that though, other than beat people with the clue-stick until such time as they grow a protective layer of cynicism.
I'll help by educating people where I can, but there is a point beyond which I refuse to take responsibility for people doing the wrong thing because they don't know any better and don't take a second to think: often it is down to things looking too good to be true (to the point where zero/little techie skills/experience are needed to see this) or things quite obviously being dodgy - if people lose data in either case I have little sympathy. Maybe losing important data is the only way they'll ever learn.
Give a user a good fish and they'll be fed without poisoning today.
Teach a user to fish safely and they'll potentially be fed safely for life.
Users who refuse to engage their brain and learn to fish safely? Let 'em starve or get poisoned.
Of course if you see data you might want in future hosted in an impractical manner, take a copy now and make sure you put it somewhere (or several somewheres) more safe.
The media companies need to do something against "piracy", otherwise it looks like they're complicit.
The MPAA/RIAA/equivalent are industry bodies that are funded to protect their members. These members want to see a return on their investment, and press coverage about shutting down a high profile filesharing site shows that they're doing something. Everyone wins.
Of course it will have no impact on the availability of filesharing sites. If anything, the rise in bitcoin mining malware will make it even more profitable to set up such services.
Afaik Dropbox stops the sharing of file once it goes beyong a given (relatively limited) bandwidth. Not making it legal, but making it pretty much impossible to use it as a "file share" on sharing forums.
That's also a very bad idea. What if I just happen to be very popular and I want to distribute my data to a large group of people. Does github close down projects which got too many clone requests?
Dropbox is a pay-to-upload business model but cyberlockers use a pay-to-download business model (they used to pay referral fees to uploaders, but this was so obviously shady that everybody is dropping it). The judge in the Hotfile case ruled that Hotfile had vicarious liability for copyright infringement because they profited more from distributing more popular content.
This is so wrong. I use these single click file hosting sites all the time to share totally legal content with my friends. It's just bad idea to attach 2 GB file to an email. Also one link can be shared with group of people in Skype chat or so, without requiring me to upload same data to everyone who's interested.
Keep in mind - the objective is not to shut down the sites, but make it difficult enough that your average person goes to legal sites instead.
Take me for example - I wouldn't have the faintest clue where to go find an illegal copy of a TV season on a "File Locker" - but I have zero problem finding legit stuff on iTunes or Amazon or Netflix.
I think the MPAA / RIAA have been very effective - in 2004/2005, there were a ton of places I knew about to download stolen content - but today - nope.
Exactly. However, the methods of obtaining these files legitimately have improved vastly since then too. I will take whatever route is most convenient. For music, if I can give you my card details and you take a prearranged amount from my account every month, and I don't get interrupted, I will happily pay for this service (Spotify). Give me a TV service where I pay a fixed fee, and get to watch what I want when it suits me (on a saturday night, not at 9pm on a tuesday when I have to be up at 6 the following day), and I'll pay for it (Netflix). Service to get the latest and greatest game that my friend has been talking about all day, but all the shops are closed when I get home? Steam! Note that steam started selling 3rd party games in 2005, Spotify started in 2008 and Netflix started in 2007 (Streaming I mean, not the DVD on delivery). I realise this is only true for a small minority of countries (I'm in ireland), but Before these services, the alternatives were pirate or go and buy in a store. Now that I can easily get the media I want through legitimate means, I have virtually no reason to pirate stuff. Sometimes however, games I want/music I want is unavailable on X service. If I download it/use it I'm probably going to buy it at the next opportunity anyway.
I think this is taking an easy way out. If every one stops pirating and there is no piracy, raii/mpaa will make it expensive enough that poorer people will not be able to afford it or would be left out. Look at the isps and cable companies where there is no alternative(atleast in US) and they squeeze as much as they can out of the user giving as little as possible. In a way piracy is kind of a competition for media companies to make shows available for a reasonable price.
You don't need a licence to use a typeface in a design, only to install a font file on a computer. And OS X ships with a version of Helvetica so they might have just used that.
Edit: Yes i get them from fan subbing sites because no company is willing to license it and sell it. I buy what i can and take what i can't.
I'm certain there's tonnes of legitimate content being lost on every shutdown some of it permanently if it's not very common or popular.
I think people should be allowed to sue the MPAA or RIAA if they take down content they don't own.