The Nature of Piracy

The link a few days ago to Jim C. Hines's blog was the closest I really wanted to come to saying something about the Oatmeal and that site's recent comic about pirating the Game of Thrones TV show. Then this happened. Particularly this one paragraph (emphasis mine):

Many of them based their retort on the fact that Game of Thrones would ship from Amazon on March 6th and I just needed to wait longer. Truth be told, the show started airing almost 40 weeks ago -- I just happened to publish my comic right around the corner from when it was being released on Blu-ray. 40 weeks is a long time to wait. The sentiment that we pirate because it's easier not because we're thieves still rings true; Game of Thrones just happened to be an untimely example.

To me, arguing that timing has anything to do with it is very much a specious course of argument. Yes, it's been the better part of a year since the show started airing, on April 17th, 2011. And yes, I can imagine that that kind of wait would factor into any decision that one would make. I know this in part because I've faced the same decision.

As I've mentioned, my favorite anime series is Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. A movie, one that I had been almost intensely looking forward to, began airing in theaters on January 23rd, 2010. I was not in Japan at the time and had no ability to watch the movie, short of looking for pirated copies, until the (Japanese) DVD release on November 26th of that same year. To make a long story short, I did not watch the movie until the day of its DVD release, when I bought a copy of the DVD and watched that. (I was in Japan at the time. To date, there is no American DVD release of the movie, although the Japanese DVD has English subtitles.)

Or, take Puella Magi Madoka Magica, one of the best new magical girl shows. That began airing on the 6th of January, 2011, running until April 21st. (Its run was delayed slightly in the aftermath of the earthquake, as an aside.) The American DVDs are just now releasing - the first released on Valentine's Day this year, and the entire run won't be available on DVD until June, if I recall correctly. As of this moment, I still have not watched the entire series.

I bring up these examples not to denigrate the Oatmeal's choices, but to emphasize my own personal experience in similar situations. 40 weeks is a long time to wait, and it certainly would be easier for me to pirate these shows rather than continue to wait. I can respect that for many people, the primary factor in their decision does have to do with that ease of access - the idea that these people are mustache-twirling super-villains out to suck all of the money out of HBO's or Aniplex's coffers is ridiculous.

All the same, the defense doesn't ring true. Because regardless of the reasons behind it, choosing to pirate the series is in the end a choice to become a thief. Saying that you were acting as you did for the sake of easier access is a mitigating factor, but it is not a defense and does not change the fundamental facts of the situation. As a result, what I want to see from the Oatmeal and from the people that pirate shows is not this kind of evasion, not the "we're really not thieves, honest!" line of argument.

I direct you back to Jim C. Hines: Own. Your. Choice. Take responsibility for your decision, whether that decision was to wait or not to wait, to pirate or not to pirate. I will not outright condemn you for choosing either one, but I can have little respect for someone who refuses to admit to themselves the nature of their actions.

The Role of Fansubs

Oh, right, fansubs. I think it's safe to say these days that I have absolutely zero interest in searching them out anymore. I think it's safe to say that they should rightly be on their way out within the next few years.

There are a number of reasons for those statements, but really the core of it has to do with what you think the role of fansubs is supposed to be for anime communities. I tend to consider them a last resort, rather than a first. The first fansubbed anime I ever seriously picked up was Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, because I didn't see any other way of getting access to the series. Heaven knows it didn't have an American release back when I got it. (It still doesn't, as of the time I'm writing this.)

This is because I think that fansubs are rightly supposed to be a patch. There was (and still is in some ways) a gap between the interest in anime in the United States and the availability of anime in the United States. In Japan, new anime comes out every season, airing every week. Whereas the United States got a fraction of those shows, and even then would often see sanitized, altered, or just plain bad versions. Anyone up for Cardcaptors? No? Didn't think so.

In such an environment, it comes as little surprise that people would get together and put up subtitled versions themselves, providing the anime that people in the United States wanted to watch. It's probably not legal, given that that's distributing the anime without the rights to do so, but the company isn't actually losing anything, because if there's no fansub people simply can't watch the anime. And hey, you know, maybe someday we'll get a proper DVD release and can buy that when it comes out, right? (I seriously doubt that most fans actually do buy the anime they've already watched, but maybe I'm wrong.)

These days, that's changing. It's changing for me on a personal level and it's changing for the entire U.S. anime community on a societal level.

For me, well... I'm studying Japanese. I've been to Japan once and want to go back. I went out and bought anime DVDs left and right while I was there. I don't need, nor do I want, a patch anymore: I want to watch the anime on TV as it comes out, and then buy the Japanese DVDs once they're released. Aside from the myriad of special features on those DVDs, there's the added bonus that I don't have to worry about whether what I'm doing is legal or moral. Because it unquestionably is. And if you take Nanoha StrikerS as an example, well, I have all of those DVDs, and still think that every single cent I spent on those was absolutely worth it.

On the societal level? Well, go look at Hulu one of these days. Go back and look at my earlier post about Fate/Zero. There's anime out there already. Some of it brand new from Japan, in the latter case. That patch that fansubs are supposed to provide, filling the gap between what U.S. fans want and what they have? We're seeing companies moving to fill that gap themselves. They're exercising their right to distribute their anime in the fashion that they prefer, even in the U.S. market.

The role of fansubs is to fill a gap in the U.S. market. If this trend persists, if more companies and studios decide to step in themselves, that gap might not exist in the near future. And then we stop talking about role, and start talking about duty: the duty of fansubs and their creators to recognize that without a legitimate role, fansubs simply should not exist.