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Fansubbers Under Fire
CNet is running a story about new developments in the fansubbing world. The article provides some background, and then discusses
Media Factory's recent letters to fansubbers demanding removal of their shows. Historically the studios have turned a blind eye towards the work of the fansubbers, and the assumption has always been they they secretly approve since the fans work is amazing market research. I've bought countless DVDs based entirely on the work of fansubbers, so I hope that this isn't the beginning of the end.
...for two reasons.
(1) "Anxious times in the cartoon underground." Nothing like the term "cartoon" to once again give people inaccurate impressions of the entire anime world. I expect better from CNET.
(2) I will not buy DVDs blind, nor will I watch anime dubbed. I require at least a sampling before I plunk $ down on discs. Fansubs meet this requirement and have determined every single one of my anime purchases, with the exceptions of those series that came out before fansubbing really existed.
The coolest voice ever.
Well, if companies like Funimation would actually translate the real words instead of making most of them childish, then people might wait until the anime is released to the US because the translations are correct. It is amazing to compare the translations these big corporations do, compared to the real script.
No doubt some people go too far in their fansubbing, but on the other hand it is very rare indeed that a corporation will be or even can be reasonable (think of how their stockholders would react to a corporation allowing unauthorized copying of their content). That is why the law must provide the balance. If you think that there ought to be a reasonableness to this kind of thing the I recommend that you make your feelings known. Support the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
One thing I know for sure, if we do nothing then eventually we will live in a world where you have to pay every time you read your kid a bedtime story.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I don't get it, why are you all bashing the fansubbers? It's like taping an tv episode for a friend in a forein country and translating it for them. I don't think language should be a barrier to determine what is piracy and what isn't. I mean, anyone can watch tv for free and tape it, hell record it if you like on an HD. So I don't see how it's wrong in any way, unless of course it's licensed in the country you live in, which in this case is most likely the states.
So again, how is this different from doing it with US shows and giving it to a friend in Europe who doesn't want to wait forever to receive it on their network, and while you are at it, translate it for them?
forgive my ignorance about fansubbind/anime/etc.. my questions are those of a complete layman (but a layman who works in the entertainment/film industry).
most of these are JP-only cartoons that are dubbed/titled in english (presumably for american or EU audiences on the net).. i fail to see how this really affects the target demographic that the cartoons were released for. I'm not saying it's 100% okay to take someone else's work and give it away for free (modified or not).. as it isn't yours.. but certainly there are shades of gray in every avenue.. and i have to imagine that giving away a retitled work to an audience that would have never had a chance to see it anyway (as it plays on tv in another country), when the original work probably played for free in japan anyway (on tv) seems a little more "gray" than it does "black."
we release commercial products, and certainly i dont want anyone to give them away for free, but if i found out someone had DIVX ripped my latest DVD release and subtitled it in japanese, it wouldnt exactly break my heart. in fact, i'd probably be excited, because if we had any sort of widespread downloading success in japan, those people [who dubbed my videos] would actually just be growing a potential market for me.. whereby someday we could release a native japanese version and sell 10x as many units because we are now that much more of a household name in japan.
not saying you're wrong, just saying it's not as cut and dried as you imagine it to be (imo).
If you're an honest user of these communities' work, react by not buying the licenses of those series where the studios don't let you see fansubs as preview.
If fansubbers' argument that they actually promote purchase of the English-language license is true then the Japanese studios will soon back off when their offerings are less competitive because American licensees' profits are lower.
Myself, I've used fansubbers in the past.
;) ) to read all the subtitles. Which was OK, but now that the series is coming out on DVD in the US with dubbing I don't have to be there every minute. So I'll start buying the whole series as it comes out so she can watch it without me.
My daughter (age 6) had what I call a "Disney princess image" issue. Thanks to the Disney cartoons, she let me know one day that "Princesses don't fight - they just wait for the prince to rescue them".
I didn't like that idea.
So I found other things for her to watch, like "Magic Knight Rayearth" (cute little girls fight with swords against monsters), "Kiki's Delivery Service", "Angelic Layer" (cute little girls with robot dolls that fight each other into submission), and so on.
One of those is a (formerly) fansubbed series called "Stellvia of the Universe", which features a girl attending school in a space station, dealing with the ins and outs of school life. Shima (the main character) is a geek girl, and my daughter and I got a kick out of her (mis) adventures.
The only problem was that Daddy had to be there since she's not a fast enough reader (hey, she's only six
But we've started on other fansub works, like the "Ah! My Goddess!" series now running in Japan. We sit together, I read the subtitles and do the voices for her, and she's started picking up a little Japanese. When the series reaches the US I'll still buy them.
At the same time, I respect the animation studios who might not want their work fansubbed. In those cases, I'd recommend the fansubbers could create external subtitle files (I believe these are idx files that work with VLC or MPlayer), and people could be encouraged to rip their own DVD's to AVI files with special instructions, like "Use Handbrake at X rate blah, blah, blah".
This way, animation studios could still sell DVD's, funsubbers and fans like myself could still get "previews" of a sort. It would be better if the studios would work with the fansubbers and sell the movies online for cheap (say, $3 an episode in a nice XVID format or some such, $1 to the fansubbers and $2 to the production company), since thanks to them I'm going to wind up spending about $150 in DVD's that I would not have otherwise.
Guess we'll wait and see what happens. I'm sure there are people out there who only watch the fansubs and never buy the DVD, but as the article mentions, there may be a few if the "middle area" (the ones people watch on fansubs but have no intention of buying ) animes that lose sales as a result. (Which is why I think the "buy fansubbed for $3" would be a better result for everyone involved.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
"Whether it's theft of service, or theft of property, it's still theft."
It's called copyright infringement.
No. That doesn't make sense.
Anime are cartoons.
Bugs bunny is also featured in cartoons.
Opera is music
Rap is music
You see where i'm going here?
Most fansub groups cease distribution of a given series as soon as it's licensed for production in the US. The point is that until it's licensed there is *no* english translation. Hard to argue that you're costing a company sales when they arent providing that product.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Personally, I think the greatest benefit of these fan translations is that it keeps the companies relatively honest. Fans already know the dialogue can be competently translated, so there's less excuse for poor dictionary-switch translatings or covering up harder dialogue with protected laughter that has nothing to do with the movement of character mouths. Heck, a few companies have made use of fan translations when doing their subtitling.
That said, with the company's request, they should immediately shut down translations of that company's work. *wry grin* It will likely mean lower sales due to decreased publicity, but that's that company's perogative. We must respect that.
^_^ So glad you understand now.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
No matter how much additional style or substance is added to it, anime still qualifies as an animated cartoon. Apparently, CNET is aware that they are speaking to a general audience that is not as refined in their... well, cartoon-watching.
I wish you lot would just calm down a bit, it's not like you're whiter than white either, and I can't see you're problem if you're not even interested in anime.
And stop thinking that world=USA, there are lots of us in other parts of the world, and, as I stated earlier, most of the time we _never_ _ever_ get a legal release (Case in point, 9/10 of the fansub's I've watched haven't been released under any form where I live, let alone translated), so it's not like the shareholders are loosing money on this.
In short: Fansubs disapear as soon as a legal distrbution method appears, and in most cases the legal version doesn't appear at all, so there's nto much to complaine about.
David
P.S: Before you start moaning that more legal releases would appear but for fansubbing, remember that their probably wouldn't be anything like the number of manga/anime available today had it not been for the free publicity that the fansubbers provided.
Ask 8 slackers a question, get 10 awnsers (a citation, but I can't remember from who)
Nobody is saying you're wrong in a technical sense. What the poster was getting at is the word "cartoon" carries a very specific tone and set of boundaries in the US (which is where I'm from, at any rate). Here, the word "cartoon" means, something animated for the kids - high-frame-rate, low quality, simple platitudes, etc. Something you grow out of.
Anime, on the other hand, encompasses a much larger set of genres and audiences. Anime is designed for everyone from kids (and God, do we know that, thank you Pokemon) to teens and adults. Anime even has sub-genres - definite sci-fi series, comedy series, westerns, horror, etc. What was the last time you saw a horror "cartoon"?
Most of all, though, anime has much more interesting subject matter - stuff that makes you think. The characters are not one-dimensional, and are not all designed for gags as they are in 99% of "cartoons". The storylines are well written and continuous, and characters develop and change. Depending on the series, the nature of family, friendship, religion, or even reality itself is challenged. And when you're tired of all of that, yes, there's plenty of comedy and "low humor" as well.
This is why anime fans get upset when you call it a "cartoon". Yes, it is a cartoon. But calling it such implies it is much, much narrower and vapid than it deserves.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
If you want Japanese cartoons before they're released in English, learn Japanese.
It's not a matter of "before". Many shows and movies are never translated. There is no legal way to aquire them, and "learn Japanese" isn't an answer and you know it.
Every fansubber I've ever dealt with has stopped providing tapes as soon as the title is going to become available (e.g. when Disney signed with Studio Gibli for all the Miyazaki films like Princess Mononoke all the fansubs for Miyazaki films vanished). Yet there is still no way for me to get a legal subtitled version of Nausicaa, so I'm keeping my fansub. If Disney releases it, I'll buy it.
Realize that fansubbing was going on in ernest at a time before the general anime craze in the U.S. This was back before you could find a whole aisle of anime at Fry's and Best Buy. This was when a video store's "japanimation" section consisted of Akira and a couple random episodes of Sailor Moon.
Copying isn't stealing. When the owner of the material isn't even trying to sell it to you, then there isn't even the hypothetical loss of revenue argument. To then call that STEALING is just being a SYCOPHANT.
The enemies of Democracy are
I realized I'm joining the discussion a whole 3 hours late which means no one will probably read this comment, but what the hell...
First, a little history:
I used to fansub shows starting about five years ago, but my roots in online fansubbing go back even farther, to 1997. I was one of the three groups (although I guess I was really only one person) who pioneered online distribution of fansubs in the first place, back when RealPlayer G2 had just come out and Cable modems and DSL were just first available. I used to take VHS fansub tapes, encode them to RM, and make them available on my website. If you run across old Sailor Moon RM files, or Macross 7, or later on any of the Fumei Anime encodes, that was me.
Then DivX and broadband changed everything, and the whole online scene exploded. Now, you had people in Japan ripping raws from TV in high quality (beginning with Noir and Vandread, they were the real breakout series for Digital Fansubbing, or digisubbing) and groups translating and reencoding these raws, you no longer had to wait for an old-school tape fansubber to translate it and distro tapes. It was revolutionary.
But about that time I started to see where things were headed, and I got out of fansubbing more than two years ago because I came to realize that the modern fansubbing scene is nothing more than the next warez scene. Everything turned into speed, speed, speed, and became less about quality and the love of anime and more about online prick-waving contests about which group was cooler and got their releases out faster. I grew out of that crap when I was 16, thanks.
Today's market no longer needs fansubbing. Fansubbing was important back when shows might never get brought over to the US, or releases might not occur for another 4 years (like ADV and Excel Saga, for instance), but today the domestic anime companies get their product out in reasonable timeframes (it's no 1 week wait time, but that's for obvious reasons), produce good product (if they don't they hear about it forever, ask ADV about Eva Vol 1 sometime), and do a bang-up job of trying to get the whole phenomenon out to new people.
Anything good that gets aired on Japanese TV will be licensed in the US, period. Everything that's being produced in Japan now is licensed before it airs, so this crap about US companies looking to fansubbers for direction is bunk. All fansubbing is these days is whole-sale piracy on the one hand and another silly adolescent online rat race on the other. When you have "release" groups, distro groups (read torrent sites), and all of these things have three letter abbreviations, you know it's just the new warez scene.
That's why I got out. The last show I enjoyed subbing was Kokoro Toshokan, because I knew it would never get brought here (indeed, it still hasn't after three years). That was what fansubbing was about. Today's scene is a terrible perversion of the ideals of fansubbers of old.
"I want to get more into theory, because everything works in theory." -John Cash