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You might as well save your money and watch fansubs because the bootlegs you're buying are no better for the creators.

Yes, you are buying bootlegs. Sometimes the quality of bootlegs can be very high and you may not think it, but based on your description I'm 99% sure you're buying bootlegs. Just the fact that they are region free is clue enough (I know of no legitimate DVD manufacturer that produces region free anime...yes, it's theoretically possible, but nobody does). Anyway, check out the Pirate Anime FAQ.

Admittedly, it's geared towards anime, but check out The Pirate Anime FAQ. They've got a lot of nice little tips such as areas to watch for false logos, not to mention some common-sense rules of thumb such as episode to disc ratios (As they state, a typical ratio is 2-3 episodes per disc. If you're getting Seasons 1-7 and they list only 14 DVDs, it's probably pirated and there's a good chance that you're getting a lower-quality product.

And that album was one of the last ones released on DigiCube; it should have the DigiCube logo and the price in yen (2,500) on the packaging, along with other little telltale signs. If it's from SM, Ever Anime, or another label, it's definately a bootleg.

What you haven't taken into account is that there are lots of 'streams' of anime. Things like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Miyazaki (i.e. Spirited Away, Totoro, Mononoke, etc.) have been a lot more mainstream and accessible to North America at large for many years. Anime will retain its 'geek cred' because there are many many layers of fandom, and you can go deeper and deeper. Most people will not ever hear of shows like Kyou Kara Mao, Tenchi na Konamaiki, Kimi ga Nozomu Eien, Gravitation and the like. Go deeper, and you will see that 97% of what's present even in the North American market is still restricted (for the moment) to the world of geekdom.

Of course the companies that license and release manga and shows like Bandai USA, Geneon, FUNimation, AD Vison, Tokyopop, etc. are trying to popularise it and I fully support this! If they can make the genre more popular, it means the prices will get lower through volume sales, they will be easier to find, and more titles will be licensed and brought over to North America. Even today is has improved a lot, as now a preorder DVD with 4 episodes goes for US$18-19 as opposed to a VHS with 2 episodes for $50. (And fansubs don't count folks, they are illegal, don't support the creators, but though highly useful for reasons I won't get into. Also 90%+ of the stuff on e-bay is low quality pirate swag, so go educate yourselves and avoid it.)

Regardless, my point is that the market and range of products available are bigger and more diverse than you have given it credit for. Even in Japan there is certainly a hardcore geek cult following that takes it further than anyone else. (Go rent yourself a copy of Otaku no Video and see what I mean.)

• Hint #1: you can't generally get a full 26-episode season of an anime legitimately for under $100ish (if not more: see the original prices on the Cowboy Bebop and Trigun box sets).
• Hint #2: No 'official' release is going to be region-free.
• Hint #3: no legitimate release is going to squeeze 26 episodes onto 4 DVDs (the box set I saw) and (almost) no official release is going to have english that bad, not in this day and age.

Can you post some more info on the set that you purchased? You mentioned that they are imported from Taiwan, so that makes me wonder if they are, in fact, bootlegs. There are some legitimate Taiwanese releases, so I don't want to make a huge assumption, but this idea of forcing someone to re-purchase the entire series just to get the ending doesn't sound quite right to me. I could possibly understand if this was done and two different sets had different extras, but restricting access to the shows itself sounds a bit odd...

Another thing I am seeing more and more are dishonest retailers. I recently bought some CDs which I thought were legitimate Japanese releases. It turns out that the discs were CDRs with really bad laser printer silk screens. The retailer went through the effort of making copies of all of the inserts, even the obis (paper sleeve). I've never heard of any bootleg quite like this. The kicker is that a lot of these CDR CDs were for out of print releases, and this retailer was even selling them at normal import prices (as opposed to the "normal" bootleg prices. The proverbial double-whammy. Anyway, the retailer was Digital Discs Anime. They lost their domain recently, but they still go to conventions. My advice to avoid them, since they are (in one way or the other) lying to their customers. Er, to get back on topic, my main point is that the guy selling you your DVDs might just be feeding you a line, trying to absolve himself of any guilt/responsibility.

Anyway, here's the Pirate Anime FAQ, just in case.

Now please, don't flame me as a fan of mainland China's repressive regime. But the Taiwanese government doesn't exactly have the world's best track record, as I recall. I hear occasional notes about "problems" with civil rights, and then there's the whole pirated anime problem.

So when I read this line:

"National intelligence has indicated that an army of hackers based in China..."

my BS-o-Meter starts clicking. Though the article is non-technical, it includes other notes that make the meter tick faster:

"...has successfully spread 23 different Trojan horse programs... 10 private high-tech companies... break into at least 30 different government agencies and 50 private companies," Cabinet Spokesman Lin Chia-lung said yesterday.

We have a lot of big, scary numbers... but no hard information about the programs, the companies, or the government agencies.

In fact, the "23 different Trojans" makes me think that the government cabinet member is talking out of his butt. More likely, nobody's been running virus protection, and those 24 Trojans are simply members of F-Secure's wildlist.

Then, there's this "helpful" suggestion:

"If there's any lesson from this experience, it is not to use software developed in China or hire Chinese computer programmers, because you're running the risk of having the software you use implanted with the Trojan-horse program," he said.

That sounds like nothing more than the usual tit-for-tat barbs that Taiwan and China have been throwing across the strait for decades. In fact, I suspect that's what this whole Trojan Horse issue is -- all bluster, no substance.

And finally, off the actual topic: let's watch the Slashdot effect in action! When I first hit the Taipei Times article, it included this text at the bottom:
This story has been viewed 1128 times.

By the time I typed this comment, the number had not changed, so I'm probably getting a cached copy. What did it show when you hit it?

When it comes to Japanese products, it is certainly not a big secret how to tell bootlegs apart from the legitimate products. This is especially the case for Japanese CDs which have a number of sure fire criteria any one of which suffices to make the distinction. Most of the information below is taken from the Pirate Anime FAQ.

Any CD that says "Made in Japan" or something to that effect on the back cover or the paper spine is certainly legit. Even for Japanese CDs, the line "Made in Japan" is almost always printed in English.

Anything by the Taiwanese labels Son May or Ever Anime is bootleg, because these companies have no licensed Japanese items in their portfolios.

If it says neither "Made in Japan" nor "Son May" or "Ever Anime", then there is a small chance that it is actually legitimate. However in my experience this has never actually been relevant to Tokyo Kid because every single one of their in-store CDs fits into one of the above two categories.

I moved out of the Boston area last month, but I can say with certainty that as of last month their in-store CD inventory consisted 99% of Son May and Ever Anime labels and only 1% of "Made in Japan" material.

I have never purchased anything from Tokyo Kid via mail order, so it is possible that they sell the bootleg CDs only in-store and not via mail order.

I know the japanese dvd of this didn't have subtitles, so yours is deffinately bootleg.

check out http://www.digital.anime.org.uk/piratefaq.html

Other than that, if you aren't sure about something (and it isn't very old) go to the offical japanese site, they usualy mention dvd releases and would say if it has subtitles. (If you can't read japanese, learn or make a friend who can.)

The vast majority of Studio Ghibli products released in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and other southeast Asian countries are not licensed. These locations are notorious for their lax (or non-existent) enforcement of copyright laws, so be very careful when purchasing any video product manufactured or sold in this area.

There have also been numerous reports of various Studio Ghibli DVDs manufactured in Hong Kong or Taiwan being sold at stores, online shops, or on Internet auctions. As far as we have been able to determine, these are pirated copies. To our knowledge, only IVL in Hong Kong and Buena Vista Home Entertainment in Taiwan sell authorized or licensed Studio Ghibli videos/DVDs. Visit the Pirate Anime FAQ for more information on spotting bootlegged items.

The DVD set from an outfit called "Anime Cartoon International" (now known as "Manga International", not to be confused with "Manga Entertainment") is a definite bootleg. The following is from Steven Alpert, the Managing Director at Studio Ghibli International Distribution:

I will be in touch with our attorneys to see what we can do to get the sales of these on eBay stopped, and I would imagine Disney will want to do the same.

Thanks and best regards,
Steve

To report the sale/auction/distribution of pirated material, contact:

Joe Woodall
Corporate Legal Department
The Walt Disney Company
Burbank, CA 91521-0662
joe.woodall@disney.com

What you are holding in your hands are bootleg copies, sir.

Here is a link to the pirate anime FAQ:

http://www.digital.anime.org.uk/piratefaq.html

I happen to be good friends with some folks that run an anime store, so know a bit about this.

The anime merchandise market is full of bootleg products, from CDs to Wallscrolls to Action Figures. It's often very difficult to discern which products are real imports and which are bootlegs. You might want to look at a page like this.

The best advice, though, is that if the deal looks too good to be true, it is. You can't import an anime soundtrack from Japan that is authentic and sell it for under $12 and make a profit.

That practically screams bootleg. Don't buy nonlicensed anime; it's the same as paying someone to photocopy an entire book for you. For more info: Pirate Anime FAQ

I interviewed at Sun in '98 these where everywhere

This is neither new nor interesting from a UNIX user's perspective. Only in the Windows world do you really really need a workstation of your own. The model they where using then was the JavaStaion these have been around since 1996 http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/9611/sunflas h.961114.html

A thin client (Oracle/Larry Ellison propaganda aside) is a jumped up X-Term with a disk drive and maybe a local hard drive or large removable media. If you have a really skilled SysAdmin staff (I imagine Sun does) you can run all your regular UNIX customization & Window Makers on this, Gnome, Enlightenment, and even play Quake where ever your at in the whole world. Your not tied to hardware with can be stolen or virus'd

So the workstation is $500 a pop, the CPU isn't just a local P-4 or something it's the front end for some big set of Mid-range or higher box like a Sunfire or SunCat or some other UNIX or even Microsoftie server.

when somebody tells me about how cool their new Dell is and how well it can crunch that Excel, I just smile, I can have screensavers that are actual Fractals in real time. Wine sessions that out run the latest P4

Ok, so the one you saw has got a little Grey Flannel Suit look to it, but you have to remember it's a company system. Sorry to be L33tist but if the bulk of your contact with a computer is 9-5 your going to have fish as your screensaver and a picture of your kids as your background.

As we progress with the routine technical advancement your going to see a things like SUN 450 Enterprise w/Quad 480Mhz processors showing up on Ebay for $500, Likely in about 18 months

Schools and small businesses are going to start wondering why they are being nibbled to death by Microsoft and Apple and the various shadowy and dodgy hardware vendors (Compaq, Dell, Packard Bell) and switch into where this setup is more common it will look more like the NAVI from Lain

This review contains some spoilers, don't read it if you like your movie surprises.

More to the point...

If you watch the "Making of..." on the DVD the Watchaski(sp?) Brothers explicitly state that the idea of the Matrix comes from an Anime series. Now which Anime series features computers as much as Lain. No, I rather think that Matrix was made because of Lain.

David "Dragon" Cotterill
President: London Anime Club.