Amidst a record number of site closures, Nick and Lucas discuss sailing the high seas of anime piracy.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
One Piece, Naruto, Death Note, Fena: Pirate Princess, Elden Ring, Black Lagoon, and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure are currently available on Crunchyroll, while Berserk (1997) is currently only available on Blu-ray. Baccano! is unavailable for direct purchase or streaming in the U.S.
Nick
Well Lucas, word’s come down from the boss that we’ve got to talk about piracy in anime now. Personally, it seems a bit premature—we still don’t know what the 2nd season of
Netflix‘s
One Piece is gonna do with Chopper—but let’s get down to business. So, should we start with the fun pirates or the not-fun pirates that nobody remembers?
Lucas
Truthfully, Nick, I can talk about either, but only after we discuss how wild it is that the only two anime that come up when you Google “Pirate Anime” are
One Piece and
Fena: Pirate Princess. Come on, Alphabet overlords! Pictures of
Black Lagoon deserve to surface before dozens of AI gens of anime girls in pirate hats!
Well, I mean, there are worse things that could pop up if you google that. Or rather, there were. As of the end of last month, a number of largely-used anime piracy sites very suddenly went poof all of a sudden.
Yup!
Thanks to “Operation Anime”, a number of popular illegal anime streaming websites have been shut down in an effort by the Brazilian government. Fun fact, I didn’t know that most of these sites were based out of Brazil until they stopped existing!
I can’t blame you for that. Part of the history of this particular angle of piracy websites is that they move a lot. I say these sites were well-known, but as somebody who hasn’t done the “where to watch ___” bit for anime in years, I didn’t recognize nearly any of them. There’s doubtless continuity behind the scenes, but many of these sites persist by vanishing and reappearing under new names and hosting platforms whenever the heat catches up.
Ah, the days of pirates waving their jolly roger with pride truly have passed.
You bring up an interesting point, though. We’re both fairly far along in our “professional” anime careers, making this a bit of a weird topic for us to discuss. Maybe I’m mistaken, but I get the impression that once you reach a certain level of notability in the anime community, piracy becomes a bit of a taboo subject, as even talking about it runs the risk of raising awareness about anime piracy sites.
Am I wrong, or do you also feel like we’re finally talking about the elephant in the room?
Well, it certainly becomes taboo once you start writing for a website literally owned by a company that produces anime. So just imagine us writing this column while continuously looking over our shoulders at the big KADOKAWA signs behind us and nervously tugging at our collars. One of the elephants in the room is certainly that piracy has played an undeniable role in the proliferation of anime fandom in the West, but hooooooo boy do the companies in charge not like you talking about it too much.
And that’s a bummer because, while I’d love to write about how the
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure manga is the best it’s been in years, there’s no way for anyone who speaks English to support the official release outside of importing a volume written in a language that they likely cannot read directly from Japan.
Manga has it even worse since there’s way more unlicensed stuff, and most of what gets picked up isn’t for simulpub releases. Hell, even when there are simultaneous releases, leak culture can get to the point where there’s still a separation between fans who actually read the chapters vs reading spoilers from some asshole on Twitter.
And, if we want to go down this rabbit hole, this is even truer for
hentai. The VAST majority of sexually explicit anime and manga can only be accessed through pirate sites, and one of the biggest of those sites, nHentai, is
getting sued for copyright infringement.
It’s something that is intrinsically part of anime fandom, so I figure we should try to approach it from a philosophically neutral position. Without getting into the weeds of when it is or isn’t “right” to pirate, you can’t deny that it’s a part of a large number of fans’ journeys. Hell, years ago, there was a time when Crunchyroll itself was a pirate site! That’s info so old I couldn’t even find news articles about it while looking through our news archives.
The world may forget, but we’ll always remember that
Crunchyroll used to do anime crimes!
Now they just do boring white-collar anime crimes, like making their services worse and more expensive. They don’t even have a cool flag or anything.
While I’ll be the first to chide Crunchyroll for their modern-day exploits, I can’t even judge them for their OG offenses! If I’m being sincere, I don’t know if I’d be as big into anime and manga as I am today if rampant internet piracy didn’t make both readily and cheaply available to me when I was a kid.
There are few among us—especially in the internet age—who got into anime entirely through legal means. Sure, I got my introduction through the high school anime club’s DVD collection, the library’s manga selection, and Toonami‘s offerings. Eventually, there would reach a point where I needed to know what happened next in Death Note, and lo and behold, some kind person uploaded all the remaining episodes to YouTube in 10-minute segments! 15-year-old me certainly wasn’t going to split hairs on if that was legal or not.
Man, for as infamous as YouTube is about being overly aggressive in their copyright protection efforts, it is SO WEIRD that a lot of anime still live illegally on that platform in their, albeit oddly split up, entirety. For instance, Berserk (1997) has bounced around from Funimation to Crunchyroll to Netflix and now has a fantastic Blu-ray release courtesy of Discotek. Still, the entirety of that anime has remained on YouTube despite those rights changing hands numerous times.
(also, this isn’t me encouraging people to pirate Berserk (1997). That anime is worth way more than the 45 bucks it costs to buy that Blu-ray!)
That’s the versatility of not having to pay for anything, I suppose. The point is, none of us are free of sin, so let none of us cast the first low-res video of Naruto episode 189, part 2/3 English Dub. I hope that if kids these days are going to steal, they at least have higher standards than we did.
Are kids today even strong enough to watch a mirrored, 144p torrent of
Baccano!? Which somehow remains one of the best and only ways to watch
Baccano! in the US?!
I would hope they’d be savvy enough to follow the namesake of the horse in Elden Ring, but then I hear from teacher friends that kids these days have trouble navigating Windows file systems, so who knows. Though Baccano! raises a good question: What do you do when a show is just left to disappear? Funimation kept that series in print for years until Aniplex decided to take their ball and go home. Now, years later, what are you supposed to do if you want to see one of the most beloved anime of the 2000s? Blind-buy a secondhand copy from a Russian eBay vendor for a few hundred bucks?
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I think the closest we can get to ethical consumption under capitalism is by doing our best to give the original creator(s) of work money in direct exchange for that work. If there’s no way to legally pay for a given piece of media in any capacity due to situations outside of a person’s control, then I think watching a pirated upload of an anime and then buying some official merch to support the creator in some way is about as ethical as a person can be in those circumstances.
I certainly can’t throw any rocks from my glass house full of Macross merchandise. Yet I can’t deny that sometimes it feels like preservation is a post-hoc excuse. Sure, somebody passing around torrents of fansubs from the ’80s is helpful, but the evidence shows the vast majority of piracy is for airing legally available simulcasts, most of which are available across nearly the entire world.
Preservation is one of the go-to excuses for people acting in bad faith who are way too enthusiastic and vocal about watching anime illegally.
Speaking of, what’s up with those guys??? Why are some folks bragging on the internet about how they don’t pay for anime?
We all have a certain level of rebelliousness we have to let out at some time or another, and some people do it by bragging about doing the easiest crimes on the planet, I guess. Next, they’ll post jaywalking videos alongside them taking a penny from the tray at convenience stores.
Well said. Sometimes, I forget that it could be literal children on the other side of my monitor making those ignorant boasts. If they’re not developed enough to be trusted behind the wheel of a car, I don’t have to respect their opinions on the economics of the entertainment industry.
To be clear, I’m not your parents or a cop, so I don’t particularly care if you get all your anime off the cat site (which is a replacement for a different site). It’s just that I don’t think understanding bit torrent is the end-all-be-all of anti-authoritarianism. Besides, I’m not exactly gonna go to bat for
Crunchyroll when we already mentioned ways they’ve screwed over their own customer base. For instance, making
Fena: Pirate Princess.
I cannot stress enough to the people reading this that we are not cops. To make that even clearer, I believe that theft from a major corporation is the most understandable and forgivable kind of theft. Maybe don’t do it if you aren’t prepared to suffer the potential consequences, but I won’t think you’re a bad person if you don’t make that petty theft a major part of your identity.
That said, official support is the only real leverage any of us have in this industry, so I think it’s worth considering how you use your influence. Am I going to belittle myself or friends who watched
Macross shows before they became legally available? No. Am I going to encourage any and every one of them to still watch those shows when they finally hit U.S. streaming? You better believe I’m going to Rune Pika Beam them into the next dimension.
Well said! And remember readers, anime’s only released in a major way outside of Japan because companies think they can make money off of it. If they don’t make enough money for an international release to be worth the effort, they won’t keep releasing anime abroad! So supporting the official release can be as beneficial to anime fans as it is to anime creators.
However, if we could start strategically targeting this stuff, that’d be great. Like, what if we all just didn’t watch the new crop of isekai crap? Would that be cool? Please? For me? Surely, there’s honor among pirates out there!
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