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Looks like the rest of the world gets the shaft, what with no balloons or streamers...

I wonder if the Japanese party packs include a full-sized huggable version of "Nanami Madobe"?

That procedure exists already in the DMCA. It's called a "take-down" request. People sharing anime fansubs via BT have been the target of such requests for a while now. They contact the ISP; the ISP forwards the request to you; you stop sharing the material. End of story, though I wouldn't use a BT client for quite a while after receiving one of those.

Yes, it appears it really is that much better. Browse any of the threads in the Playback Help forum at AnimeSuki. You'll see lots of people complaining that they couldn't play H.264 encodes on their current hardware platform without installing CoreAVC. This is especially a problem for files in the 720p format.

I was consistently unable to play 720p encodes on my P4 running Fedora with either mplayer or xine as the engine. My newer Pentium D doesn't have the same problems, though it chokes on 1080p encodes.

The other alternative to CoreAVC is upgrading to a faster computer.

1. I defy you to cite examples of Japanese anime houses (not US dub shops) objecting to the fansubs of unlicensed shows.

1. I defy you to cite examples of Japanese anime houses (not US dub shops) objecting to the fansubs of unlicensed shows.

2. No US media company would ever have bought hard-to-categorize shows like Death Note, Nana or Prince of Tennis before the fansub community proved that there was a market for such shows among western viewers. Fansubs are basically free market research for the distributors.

3. The big money in US anime distribution comes from dubbing shows with English-speaking actors and putting it on cable TV. When a show is released to DVD as a subtitle-only set (such as season 2 of SuperGALS!, or the "Uncut" editions of Seasons 1 & 2 of Sailor Moon,) sales have been lackluster at best.

http://forums.animesuki.com/showthread.php?p=1260867#post1260867

Nonetheless, judging from the contact listed for these recent DMCA notices being served in Japan and France by BayTSP, it would seem Odex is indeed the party being represented by BayTSP (with themselves acting as an agent of a coalition of certain Japanese copyright holders). This seems likely to be part of the same campaign. They appear to be trying to position themselves as the **AA of the anime industry.

> Thus far the Japanese animeka's and mangaka's have never protested.
But they did. http://www.animesuki.com/doc.php/legal/mediafactory.html

On the bright side, if you choose to remain ignorant the anime is pretty good. :-) http://animesuki.com/

It's not like the United States doesn't pirate tons of media from Japan.

the owning companies have never expressed any desire to ban fansubs

Just on a side note to this. Most fansubbers still subscribe to the rule that once an anime is licensed, they drop the series. This obviously isn't the rule for everything. However, taking GitS:SAC as an example, the first 2-3 eps were released before a stateside licensor was announced. It was subbed by about a half a dozen different groups. An announcement was then made and only 1 continued subbing it and they were forced underground. There are several other examples of this, Naruto, Bleach, Samurai 7, etc. The fansubbing community as a community predominantly plays by the rules and even the sites that don't, there are 10s of thousands of downloads being made of each episode of a popular series like naruto and bleach, yet the subbers have yet to see any cease and desist orders to my knowledge. The only company who is known for their fierce protection of their property is Funimation. They must know it's going on, but probably don't think they are missing out on their bottom line by allowing people to get subbed, mediocre quality avi files vs. HD quality DVDs with extras, subs, dubs, and several languages. And for a link of legal torrent distribution fansubs...http://www.animesuki.com/ They discontinue any subs that aren't legal so you don't have to worry as much about what you're getting is legal or not.

Legend of Galactic Heroes. It's oldschool and it's a great show.

Lots of disturbing posts on this subject.

First of all, the US DVD prices are incredibly low. Paying $25 for 4 episodes is so ridiculously cheap that the complaints made seem foolish. I realize it's high by American standards, but compare this with what Japanese DVDs cost!

Amazon.co.jp sells Ghost in the Shell: SAC 2nd Gig DVDs, with two episodes per release, for 6300 yen. That's roughly $30 _per episode_!
Meanwhile, Amazon.com sells the US release of four episodes a volume for $23. Bit of maths, and we suddenly realize that in Japan, anime costs 500% more than in the US. _Without_ subtitles and extra dubs.

Someone might argue that the Japanese get to see all these fabulous shows on TV first, but this is a silly argument. Most anime (excepting Naruto and other popular kiddie shows) is shown after midnight on cable channels, and I'm pretty sure not everyone has a subscription for these.

Then we have the statement that 99% of anime doesn't manage the trip over the ocean...

Today, in 2005, four out of five new anime series are licensed before half of the episodes have aired on Japanese television. The remaining 20% usually get licensed within a year of the first episode.

Most likely, this "99%" figure includes all anime produced before the year 2000, which makes it fairly meaningless. Are we really supposed to demand that American companies pick up obscure cartoons from the 1970's, animated in 5 frames per second? It's just not feasible, and thus the statement is retarded. Statistics used to get attention.

Next, digisubs: the way American licensors pick up shows these days, it's hard to justify the existence and practice of the hundreds ( http://www.animesuki.com/group.php ) of fansub groups out there. There really is a lot of e-penis contest going on with the releases, not to mention political disputes between groups.

However, not all anime does get licensed. There are cases like Pita-ten, a show which I personally adore, which is yet to be picked up for the US market, and it took ages before Hajime no Ippo finally had a release as Fighting Spirit. These shows have both been subtitled in full by digisubbers, for which I am grateful.

At least one Japanese company has sent cease and desist letters regarding distribution of fansubs.

http://www.animesuki.com/doc.php/legal/mediafactor y.html

It is technically legal to download anime that's copyrighted in Japan but not yet licensed in the USA. No , like TV programs, that's illegal too. Would you warezmonkeys please stop spreading lies to each other? You fools are the entire reason for this "educaton campaign" of suing people.

It's not a lie.

Read here:

Fansubs violate copyrights We have to admit it: the distribution of fansubs is technically a violation of copyright under the WTO TRIPS agreement. However the TRIPS agreement does not demand that distribution of copyrighted material is a criminal offence unless it is done on a commercial scale. This means it is up to the copyright holder to bring the offender to court. The copyright of unlicensed material is held by the original creator. In the case of anime this usually means the Japanese distribution company. If something is licenced, the licensee holds the copyright and thus the right to sue any copyright infringers within the area covered by the license. (source: ato's forum post)

Up until now fansub groups have had little to worry about legal pressure from Japan. However US companies are more likely to sue, therefore it is an additional reason for fansub groups to stop distributing a series once it gets licensed in the US.

What concerns me about this bill is the potential consequences on sharing of TV shows (I pay a @70USD subsction to Sky TV and their SKY+ service so I just view the ability to download torrents from the US as a show airs to be an extension to my subscription) - are people who share TV programs going to be liable for prosecution? Is this just going to result in the practice becoming more...circumspect and heading underground?

In addition - what about releases of NON-US IP? For example fan-subbed Anime, which while technically a violation of IP rights has quite possibly DRIVEN the creation of the Anime market in the West!

All in all IMO a poorly thought out, knee-jerk bill that may actually end up hurting the business interests of the same market it was supposed to protect.

I'm sure it does play video. My current Nokia phone, a model 6600, plays back AVI files that I run through Apple Quicktime Pro on my Mac. Before I take a road trip with my daughter, I load up my phone with some anime videos discovered through Animesuki.

The nice thing is that this is an industry standard file format, 3GPP, supported by multiple vendors, operating systems, and software packages.

WMV, on the other hand, is not.

I find Animesuki to be very upstanding. I've never seen a licensed series on there.

It began with http://www.animesuki.com/Animesuki receiving http://www.animesuki.com/doc.php/legal/mediafactor y.html a legal notice from Media Factory. Animesuki quickly responded by removing the material in question, while the fansub groups proving the material continued producing it. (Animesuki is a tracker, much like http://www.torrentspy.com/) http://www.wannabefansubs.net/ has continued producing episodes of School Rumble (which is owned by Media Factory). Now just recently their site has gone offline. I'm still wondering what happened. Any insights anyone?

It began with http://www.animesuki.com/Animesuki receiving http://www.animesuki.com/doc.php/legal/mediafactor y.html a legal notice from Media Factory. Animesuki quickly responded by removing the material in question, while the fansub groups proving the material continued producing it. (Animesuki is a tracker, much like http://www.torrentspy.com/) http://www.wannabefansubs.net/ has continued producing episodes of School Rumble (which is owned by Media Factory). Now just recently their site has gone offline. I'm still wondering what happened. Any insights anyone?

AnimeSuki statement on Media Factory

Anyone subbing Ashita no Joe?

Yes.

That's the OVA. There is also a new TV series that hasn't been licensed.

as soon as that letter went out. Animesuki stopped even stopped showing torrents. I hope Media Factory understands that by cutting off the fansubbers, they'll have an unknown success if they attempt to licence their current series to the US. The fansubbers are one of the best ways to gague how a new series will do here and in the rest of the world.

The reason why the "extra long tail" is so amazingly long is because the authors are merging two different types of BitTorrent usage. BitTorrent was designed for legitimate content, and for content distributors to run their own trackers. For example, my tracker is used just to distribute my own projects. Distribution is off the main website, with only one torrent shown. This is an example of BT's legitimate use, and even the largest legitimate BitTorrent sites pale in comparison to the piracy sites. There, you'll see much higher numbers of torrents, and few servers that only distribute small numbers of torrents.

The preferred method of distributing unlicensed anime subs is through using Bittorrent, have a look at http://www.animesuki.com/

Don't forget animesuki for those anime enthusiasts out there. Legal distribution of unlicensed, fan-subbed anime.
I don't know what I'd do without my weekly fix of watching Naruto or Bleach.

In the Japanese Manga, Video Game, and Anime, the world is already using tiny little robot girls to eliminate the insect population of the world with giant weapons. And you can dress them up in cute doll clothes!

Anime.
Anime.
Anime.

google: "torrent" 2,370,000
google: "torrent anime" 239,000

That's a healthy 10%.

You can get the fan subtitled copies of the anime in xvid format from AnimeSuki.

Well, I don't know the difference between Kazaa and BT, but BT's use has greatly increased with the ability to download japanese anime, so I'd say the legitimate traffic is still low. The good traffic can only come from Linux ISOs shared on the net.

I would say a good intro to anime couldn't be with just one series - the best thing about anime is there is no centralized theme - tbh the best way is to sample a couple of genre and my list goes as follows:
Kenshin OVA(Samurai/old world)
Evangelion(Mecha/post apocalyptic)
Ninja Scroll(the name says it all/old world)
X TV(supernatural/deep plot)not enough can be said about x tv in two phrases, this series just needs to be watched by everyone.
Berserk(you can't categorize this easily, berserk on the surface is just pure action. yet later in the series a very extreme deep plot emerges that will take any first viewer by complete surprise. I recommend this to any/everyone and can only say after the series read the manga that is still continued way past the tv series.)
the list can go on and on - and all iv listed here are relatively old compared to how much is coming out/in production right now. i posted the link earlier but this is the #1 site Anime Suki for all the newest anime released in Japan.
The greatest thing about anime is the fact that not only does it include every possible genre known to man, but they are all commonly mixed and matched(some horribly) to create something unique and intriguing. i mean what Hollywood movie have you seen that combines comedy/horror/drama/action/romance/weird genres that are specific to Japan, i think they have something to do with human life/values/reasoning. never personally looked into it. /sigh back to work.

Animesuki is a great place to find new releases.

mistake 1: you watched it in english
mistake 2: see mistake 1

to really get your cents worth out of watching anime you must watch in its natural element - the dub actors that do it in english have no emotion what so ever. Anime Suki is a torrent site for the latest anime straight from japan's televisions! If anyone is in on the gits story - im sure they are about to release standalone complex here in the states i watched the first 22 eps and i must say they stay true to the gits world!

This will probably get modded up funny, but the kids with minimal resources will likely be the first ones to break these schemes.

Consider one group that's going to have problems with this setup-the anime community. Check the links Taco put on the front page and you'll see it's a well organized international community of thousands of hardcore enthusiasts. Some of them put a lot of effort into getting high quality copies of Japanese TV shows. As soon as these DRM schemes start getting in the way of fansubbing Naruto within 24 hours of its Japanese airing, you're going to see a lot of smart, technical people with too much free time dedicated to breaking the restrictions.

I predict that people like the anime fansubbers can make a laughingstock of the DRM in a matter of days. So imagine what professional pirates will do. Even without beowulf clusters. There's groups making millions off the bootleg videos that have become ubiquitous in Asia. They have professional-quality printing equipment and the ability to make packaging the average consumer can't tell apart from the real thing. The perception that DRM prevents copying will just make it easier to convince people that bootlegs are real, and it won't slow down the pirates at all.

So whether you're getting your Japanese TV shows from groups that encourage buying DVD's and respect foreign licenses or greedy pirates flooding the retail market with bootlegs and providing the argument in favor of these systems, the DRM won't be much of a problem.

It's only going to screw you over if you're an elderly Japanese couple that wants to watch your TV the same way you could with your fancy VCR (that still blinks 12:00).

Fansubbing has really benefitted from Bittorrent. I think that a really great Animesuki feature would be to make it possible to "subscribe" to various series. This would involve some release event notification mechanism that would automatically trigger your bittorrent client to download a newly released episode. Taking this idea further, you could have a TiVo-like bittorrent based app that even went as far as to make subscription suggestions based on your viewing habits.

Ontop of that, it would be nice if a site like AnimeSuki included reviews, synopsis, and popularity ranks for each anime series.

There is allot of great fansubbed anime out there, but its hard to find something that matches your tastes. Hikaru no Go is by far one of my all time favorite animes, and its fansubbed!

My current favorite is Naruto... yeah, I am having trouble branching out into other series :(

Fansubbed eps - 17 so far - available via bittorrent here. I've seen the first dozen so far and it's very, very good.

One of the other really fascinating things to watch is the industry's response to this. The anime companies overseas are starting to realize that more and more stuff is catching on with Western audiences. The bittorrent tracker sites, like Animesuki.com offer a unique kind of "Nielsen" rating system. You get to see which new series are released and how many people download it, thus enabling you to establish demand. Sometimes, the licensing companies in America grab the series before its gone more than 5 episodes, sometimes they let an UNBELIEVEABLE series slip past for more than 75, like Naruto (knock on wood). When something gets licensed, the production companies ask the fansubbing groups to stop subbing. Almost all do. There are a few rogue groups who continue subbing it, but I would honestly have to say a large number of people stop downloading it then, especially when they can buy it. The inconvenience of having to find another .torrent with a large number of seeds is enough that most people buy the DVDs, which aren't that bad price wise.

I seriously would not be at all shocked if some anime companies started hiring a fansub group to do an "official fansub preview" where they gave maybe a special preview episode or even the first few episodes of a new series to a fansubbing group to sub and distribute, while building buzz around the partnership, and then when lots of people start downloading the .torrent, you know the time is right to release the series.

This is a great system because it gets some money into the fansubbing community to help get hardware and maybe better translations and such. It also gets quality fansubs to the fans in traditional fansubbing quality (some is much better than DVDs). The burden still rests on the studio for producing a quality anime series, because otherwise nobody will download it, so it is fair in that regard.

I'm an advertising/marketing person so perhaps I should mention that as well.

Animesuki is similar, and nicer looking, but doesn't list licensed anime. If you happen to care about that moral disctinction.

The way I figure it, with this bittorrent-RSS combination and a slight modification of torrent watching sites like animesuki we will essentially have a fansubbed anime online tivo at our disposal. Actually, you could have probably done that even without RSS, though it does simplify matters. The only limitations are our bandwidth and hard drives. Which actually are pretty limiting these days, especially with p2p being frequently capped.

Hell, you could modify an actual TiVo with broadband for exactly this sort of thing, and it needn't be limited solely to anime either. I'm sure it'll be popular with overseas watchers of American TV as well.

The international media and internet companies need to face facts and realize that Video On Demand is a reality and is already extremely popular - but that the shows people are demanding are not the ones the companies have been providing through their own limited, misfocused, and (most importantly) redundant services. Until we see simultaneous worldwide release of all media (including DVDs released simultaneously with the theatrical release) they will find themselves losing what should have been their easiest sales - those to impatiently eager fans.

Actually, if I remember correctly, the odds are better that a non-R1 Japanese-audio English-subtitle disc is actually a bootleg. Last year at Otakon a friend dropped by the hotel room with a region-free hentai disc whose English subtitles were so poor they were laughable. And never has it been said that pirates take pride in the quality of their work.

Fansubs are probably one of the most important grey areas of the current copyright mire. In an increasingly globalized pop-culture market, it is very difficult to distribute the "Next Big Fad!" if a significant chunk of your intended audience can't understand it. And it's difficult to gauge interest in these things when the test market hasn't been exposed to anything like it before. Fansubs of anime, while violating copyright law, provide a valuable service to both U.S. distributors and the original Japanese creative teams. The .us people win because they can fire up AnimeSuki and get a grasp on what series to license next, and also have a basis on which to begin their own translation work (or, in some cases, can hire out the fansubbers to do the actual subtitle timing-- IIRC this happened with Trigun). The .jp people win because it opens up new markets for tie-in merchandise (i.e. wall scrolls, manga, figures, models, etc.) and extends the profitable life of their creation (the longer it's hot, the more money it rakes in). And it's not just for Japanese series, either. Anyone notice that (other than Finding Nemo) the Best Animated Feature Oscar nominees were primarily from Europe? Moreover, who's to say this doesn't work the other way around? Surely there are, to pull some completely random and unresearched examples, Portugese who want to watch the latest episode of CSI, and diligently fansub that series into their native language? How much more interest do you think CSI would have in Portugal if not for the fansubbers? Don't you think CBS/Viacom would have some interest in those numbers to base a DVD licensing deal or broadcast deal?

It's not just a gray area that can be overlooked. The US government (and the world government at large) needs to take some serious action one way or another and hammer out a universal, non-tyrannical copyright code that puts the right rights in the hands of the consumers and not in the hands of the lawyers and corporate consortiums.

Sure, it takes about a full 24 hours to get around 1-2 hours of video (shrink down to 45-90 minutes when you're done with credits that appear at the beginning and end of every anime episode).

Scrapped Princess is definitely another anime in that category.

And if you think anime has absolutely no meaning usually, I would suggest watching Neon Genesis Evangelion in its entirety.

For a good source of free to download (unlicensed in America) anime, you should try Animesuki.com. They are one of the top bittorrent trackers out there. I should mention they only serve unlicensed anime, there ARE search engines which allow you get the licensed stuff, but I won't mention it here, suffice to say a quick Google search would give you what you seek.

I should also mention that typically the UNLICENSED anime is better than the LICENSED anime. Although companies are getting better about what they choose to license. For example, they snapped up Last Exile ASAP. It's a great series. But they still have not licensed Naruto, which is probably the most popular current anime. It's already at episode 72 fansubbed release, and plans for like 5 more seasons. Extremely immersive anime, about ninjas, and you can actually pick up some ancient Japanese culture from it.

This sounds like a precursor to Planet-es. It's a very well written anime (even from a Hard Sci-fi POV)

Missed scrapped princess so I can't say.

It's still unlicensed, so it's easy to get. Here are some BitTorrent links (I'd recommend the Keep+ANBU version). The main character is kind of annoying (especially at first), and the series turns into a sci-fi story halfway through, but overall I liked it.

This bill also has the effect of criminalizing anime fansubs and places like AnimeSuki. Must be quite embarassing for Disney that so much great animation is pouring from Japan and kicking their fuddy-duddy asses eight ways from Sunday. They can only license so much of it.

Notice how in Japan - with its more sane cultural attitude to copyright - there is an enormous, spontaneous fan culture producing things like the doujinshi phenomenon whereas in America, land of The Mouse(TM), there is NOTHING like that. There can never BE anything like that here because of these attitudes. Hence, Japan gets an energized, creative pop culture and mountains of incredible, inspired anime and we're stuck with "Treasure (Fucking) Planet" and crazed threats of cops kicking down our doors and long prison sentences for stupid "offenses".

Anyone notice how much money The Matrix has made in the last five days? Good thing no one made a shakycam copy of that and stuck it on Kazaa, or else no one would have gone to the theatre at all!

This is the war of money on art, because Hollywood has contempt for everything that isn't either money or power. It doesn't know what the fuck art is, other than a potential marketing angle. This should be called the ART Prevention act, art being a basic human experience of insight, joy and shared understanding. They may as well call the next one the RISE OF THE HOLLYWOOD MACHINES Act.

*spit*

Just download a fansub 2 weeks or so after it's done.

AnimeSuki is what I use for my current anime fansub needs.

I didn't think I'd get into fansubs, but they're quite addicting. I find myself checking AnimeSuki daily to see what new programs fans have subtitled, and then running BitTorrent to grab them.

Fansubbers have an interesting ethical code: the stop distributing and delete their works when the program is licensed for distribution in the U.S. The benefit to English-speaking fans is that they get to see works that would never get licensed outside of Japan. The benefit to Japanese producers is that their works get an English-viewing audience for free, and can then move forward on licensing those vehicles that have a more International (or at least generally American) appeal. Win-win, for the most part.