Wednesday, September 13

Anime

When Maniax Attack

Pete Zaitcev doesn't like Media Factory. He's not alone there, but I have to disagree with his reasons.

Media Factory was the first, and so far the only, anime studio to take any action against the fansub community. They didn't sue anyone, but they did request that people remove any fansubs or links to fansubs of Media Factory properties. Which is certainly their legal right, but does break with the idea that fansubs are tacitly accepted - as long as the fansubs are withdrawn from distribution once a series is licensed outside Japan. (AnimeSuki in particular is very good about this.)

Now, you can understand why studios might be willing to accept this. Their major market is Japan. A show airs on TV, they get paid, and if it's a success they stand to make the big bucks on DVD sales and plushies. Getting licensed outside Japan is always a bonus, and it helps a lot if there's a fan base outside Japan. The American anime distributors keep an eye on what the fans are talking about when they decide what to license. (Usually. Sometimes they seem to be thinking of something else entirely.)

And fansubs drive that base.

So what happened to change Media Factory's mind? Well, they had something of a hit with a TV series called Kimi ga Nozomu Eien. Which I really really hate, but that's beside the point. They followed it up with a DVD release called Akane Maniax.

And it was on the fansub sites practically the day it hit the stores in Japan. Including "raws" - direct rips of the DVDs.

One might understandably get a little upset at that.

I love my fansubs, and I sometimes don't worry too much if I decide not to buy the DVDs afterwards because I've spent, um, a lot of money on anime over the past decade. (Including at least 15 Media Factory titles, just going from memory.) And I have fansubbed some episodes of the original Dirty Pair series myself*, and might even get back to completing the task one day.

But if the studio asked me not to, I would think no less of them for that.

* From someone else's script. I just edited it and fixed the timing and stuff.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:56 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 Fansubs aren't responsible for the dvd rips floating around--Japanese dvd rippers do it and put it on various P2P (e.g. mostly Japanese ones like WinNY and SHARE) and that's where most fansubbers get their raw videos.

IIRC: Production I.G. asked fansubbers not to fansub Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex awhile ago (checking on ANN, looks like it was quite a bit less explicit than I remembered, but it did predate Media Factory by two years).

Posted by: Kayle at Wednesday, September 13 2006 12:37 PM (Qsm1J)

2 That's true, and AnimeSuki have a policy of never linking to raws, even though all the fansubs they do link to are of course produced from raws.

I looked at WinNY once but couldn't work it out.  (I think I was after the new Pretty Sammy series, which hasn't been fansubbed yet.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, September 13 2006 10:47 PM (FRalS)

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