Fansubs: must read

[Ranma4699]

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Tokyo Anime Center's Kubo Offers Proposal on Fansubs

Pokémon producer's advisory group suggests dealing with pro-level fansubbers


The Japanese government's Task Force on Media Content Business and Japanese Brands published the fourth series of proposals from its content-planning working group on February 1. The proposals discussed "a comprehensive policy for promoting content in the digital age" — particularly, how to eventually legalize the content on Nico Nico Douga, YouTube, and other video-sharing sites. The working group suggested that it may be necessary to approach the illegal uploaders directly, so that Japan can formally approve these sites.

One of the committee members, Tokyo Anime Center executive producer Masakazu Kubo, submitted a do***ent that dealt with three specific issues, including fansubbers. Kubo is the executive producer of the Pokémon anime franchise and the director of Shogakukan's Character Business Center. He is also involved with the Tokyo International Film Festival, the Tokyo International Anime Fair, and China's Beijing Film Academy. The business news website Bloomberg.com recently quoted Kubo in an article about the manga industry. The second of three sections in Kubo's do***ent is translated below:


2) Dealing with Fansubs (Fun-Subtitle) and Other "P to P" Pirated Copies (*1)
Because "Fansubs" are works, such as television animation, on which fans have added subtitles, they are usually made without authorization. Currently, 6 million copies of illegal, English-subtitled Japanese animated videos are said to be downloaded from BitTorrent each week (http://animeanime.jp/biz/archives/2007/12/bittorrent600.html). This has affected the DVD sales of Japanese animation in North America, which have dropped dramatically. As a result, the overseas prices for animation programs have fallen considerably. After the April 2008 television program schedules [in Japan] are laid out (*2), the drop in the number of animated programs will be clearly seen. In short, the Japanese animation business has fallen into a great crisis.
About 10 fans (whose translation abilities are high compared to professionals!) (*3) are said to put animated videos with foreign-language subtitles on YouTube, BitTorrent, and other file-sharing sites. If our country is to formally deal with YouTube and other services, it will be necessary to have some sort of approach to dealing with these individuals. Personally, I hope to resolve this by officially making use of their abilities.

*1 The "Fun-Subtitle" spelling is in the original do***ent. "P to P" refers to peer-to-peer file-sharing.
*2 April is the beginning of the financial and academic year in Japan, so usually, more television series premiere in this month than in any other month.
*3 The exclamation point is in the original do***ent.

[Amphibianbeast]

hehehe guilty as charged :yo

[Ranma4699]

Join the club we all do lol

[Ranma4699]

Fans want to see anime so much they just localize it themselves. Are there any good solutions for companies worried about piracy?


February 7, 2008 - Fansubbing. It's a highly controversial, highly influential element of the anime community. It has given somewhat obscure anime titles a chance to shine in America, and it has helped spread the popularity of the art form we all know and love. There's only one problem: it just happens to be illegal, and many believe it may also be killing the anime industry. How did the industry get into this mess of being both beneficiary and victim of a fan movement, and what can be done to make things right on both sides?



A Brief History of Fansubbing


Japanese animation began to become visible in America in the late '70s and early '80s. Series like Star Blazers and Speed Racer were the favorites of American distributors who saw animation as an industry targeted primarily to children, nothing more than cartoons. It was rare for a mature, meaningful anime title to make it to American shores, and those that did make it were oftentimes subjected to incredibly bad adaptations that made the Japanese studios wary.

An example of this is the infamous Warriors of the Wind, a 1986 English adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki's revered Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. New World Pictures licensed the anime, and then proceeded to mangle it. They cut expenses wherever they could, changed character names, and cut out a half hour of the original movie. Miyazaki was appalled and offended. It did not seem like the American companies took the work of the Japanese studios seriously. Miyazaki and his companions at Studio Ghibli were so offended that they refused to consider Western licenses for years afterwards. Incidents like this created a problem for the growing ranks of American anime fans that had difficulty finding high quality anime to watch. Their solution was to take matters into their own hands and distribute anime themselves.

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In the late '80s the trend of fansubbing really started to grow with a technological boost from the release of Commodore Amiga and Macintosh computers. Though these primitive home computers had limited power, with a little extra hardware the enterprising geek could use them to overlay subtitles on top of a video stream. The main tool in every fansubber's arsenal was a generator locking device, or genlock. This device enabled a television to accept two signals simultaneously. A genlock synchronizes an incoming video signal with computer output, enabling the overlay of subtitles in real-time. Many fansubbers added time synchronized VHS and S-VHS decks into their fansubbing systems as well.

Once the fansub was recorded it was packaged up and shipped off through a network of fans and fansubbers. The bulky VHS tapes were sometimes passed off to local friends, but many times the works were sent though the U.S. Postal Service. Many fansubbers and distributors used self-addressed, stamped envelopes. Fans would send the fansubbers a self-addressed, stamped envelope with blank tapes, and they would get the tapes back with their chosen episodes recorded on them. Later on, the process would be streamlined with the availability of the writable CD. CDs could hold digital data straight from the computers, no need to transfer to magnetic media, and the CDs took up much less space in the homes of the fansubbers.

It was often difficult to get quality anime out of Japan in the early days, but devoted fans found ways. Military personnel stationed in Japan would often record television shows and mail recordings back to family and friends in the U.S. Many other fansubbers paid hefty prices to import original anime recordings on laserdisc (another media dinosaur).

Fansubbers provided their services free of charge and took joy in what essentially is a hobby. But fansubbing was often a long, expensive, laborious process that would tax the resources of even the most die-hard fan. Usually fansubbers would team up to share the workload, forming a fansub group. A fansub group could consist of translators, editors, distributors, and typesetters. These groups were skilled and took quite a lot of pride in their work. Great care was taken to make the translations as correct as possible; some groups even paid professional translators to produce subtitles. Many fansubbers would include explanatory notes about Japan to explain any cultural references to their American audiences. By the mid '90s, the fansubbers had become very good at finding source material and adapting it for American consumption.


Fan Translations in the Internet Age


The advent of the Internet gave fansubbers and fans an incredible new outlet to trade new anime titles. In the early days of 28.8 modems, distribution was slow but still widespread. If you were patient, had a reliable connection on your phone line, and just a little bit of skill with IRC and Usenet, you could find hours of fansubbed anime to watch.


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But the days of those painful, slow-as-molasses, god-I-hope-it-doesn't-timeout downloads are pretty much a distant memory. Technological advances in computer processing speed and memory, along with the introduction of home broadband have created a medium where high quality subs can be downloaded in mere minutes. The rise of peer-to-peer media sharing applications like BitTorrent has created a virtual pirate trade-show.

Last year, Central Park Media's John O'Donnell hired the online metrics firm Media Defender to survey the online traffic in illegal anime downloads. Media Defender's data suggested that there are six million anime downloads per week via BitTorrent.

But peer-to-peer apps are just one choice for the otaku hungry for fansubs. Usenet and IRC, two of the earliest hubs of Internet piracy, are still going strong. Fansubs have even taken the forefront in mainstream video streaming sites like YouTube and Veoh, where the sheer volume of videos make it nearly impossible to scrub everything for copyrighted content.

The anime industry isn't alone in this crisis; manga is pirated just as much if not more. In the manga community, fan translations are called scanlations. They're made available as collections of images or in PDF files. Unlike fansubbing, which requires a modest amount of skill with video encoding and other techniques, anyone with a scanner, a decent image editing program and a good knowledge of Japanese can produce scanlations of manga. The file sizes are also smaller than video files, making them easier to distribute


Hurting or Helping?


There's little doubt that the early days of fansubbing in the '80s helped to create today's booming American anime market. But today, the wide availability of fan translations online seems to be both a blessing and a curse. Companies in the industry now watch to see what's hot online. The fansubbers are usually the first indicator to what might be big in America. The more a show is being fansubbed, the more likely it is to be a hit. If a licensor knows there's already a big market for a series, their risk is mitigated when they decide to take on a new license.

Some argue that fansubs also increase the money received from supplementary products like merchandising. Even if your average Naruto or Death Note fansub viewer never paid for a DVD, they more than likely shelled out massive amounts of money on video games, toys, clothes, and posters.

But this is a double-edged sword because the fansub/scanlation market can create over saturation, and by the time a series sees an "official" American release the market may have already gotten their fill of it. Another problem is that the translation work of the fansubbers is often pretty good and uncensored. Fansubs give the fans a pretty good representation of the original work, and that means the fans won't accept mediocre dubbing and localization from the distribution companies.

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A prime example of this can be seen with the One Piece series, which garnered a massive number of fans through fansubs. These same fans unmercifully bashed the 4Kids adaptation that aired on U.S. television because of its poor voice acting, script changes, and censoring. The situation got so bad that die-hard fans of the show encouraged new viewers to avoid the on-air version and watch the fansubs instead. Anime fans are some of the most knowledgeable consumers on the planet, they know bad product when they see it and if you try to pass off crap as gold they will call you on it. As Mike Kiley, cofounder of Tokyopop, said in a 2005 interview: "Companies in this space live and die by their ability not only to produce quality product but to retain street cred with the audience."

Despite the benefits that the fan translation community has brought to the industry, the corporations, directors, and studios still view fansubs and scanlations as areas that can breed piracy, hurting their business. This is completely understandable. After all, we're talking about people giving away their property, and the corporations have every right to protect themselves within the law. But there is an important distinction to be made between pirates/counterfeiters who sell copyrighted work for profit, and those who provide free works to promote the anime and manga that they love. Most fansub and scanlation groups work on an unwritten rule of the community: they cease distribution of their translations once a title has been officially licensed in the U.S.

Although most anime company executives still condemn fan translations as a bane to their industry, one trend cannot be disputed: the most popular fansubbed series also tend to be the highest selling.


Solutions for a Digital Era


Some in the anime industry have proposed bringing the fan translators "into the fold", suggesting that the corporations may want to seek ways to somehow officially support fan translators and monitor their behavior. Some other companies have taken an aggressive approach to the problem and have busied themselves with sending cease-and-desist letters to sites. One anime distribution company in Singapore has gone so far as to attempt to force ISPs to give them the identities of people who use BitTorrent to download titles that they have licensed.

But going after the fansub community is a time consuming and expensive process, and it certainly doesn't do much for public relations. Prosecuting people who ultimately just want to enjoy your product is not a good way to do business.

Anime companies have made the mistake of assuming that U.S. audiences will patiently wait for months or years to see series that are hot in Japan. The crux of the problem is that fans want the latest thing from Japan, right now! The fansub translation phenomenon shortens the time it takes for rabid anime fans to get their fix, as well as providing access to series that may never see an official U.S. release. The fansub trend represents a great, untapped business opportunity for anime companies in Japan and America. But to take advantage of it, they will need to think differently.

Many people in the anime community feel that the best way to curb the problem is simple: simultaneous English-language release.

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When the Naruto craze was reaching its peak in Japan, it was not uncommon to have a brand new episode of the show air in Japan on one day and see a fansub of it available online the next day. The fansubbers have gotten exceptionally good at providing what their "customers" want, the corporations that deal in anime might want to take a few notes from them.

Obviously it would be very challenging to provide DVD releases simultaneously in more than one region, and striking deals with American TV networks ahead of time would probably be equally as difficult if not more so. But the Internet can be a great distribution channel for anime; the fansub movement has already proved that. If the media conglomerates that handle the production and distribution of Anime would provide timely, high quality, online resources subtitled in English, the fansub problem could possibly be solved. AD Vision and FUNimation have recently posted free and purchasable videos on their sites, but the problem still lies in the fact that their series were released in Japan (and subsequently fansubbed) ages ago.

Fee-based services aren't the only way to go. The web boasts countless examples of lucrative sites that offer free content in exchange for eyeballs on advertisements (including the site you're reading right now). Major anime companies could strike content deals with companies like Youtube or Joost for "direct-to-internet" subtitled versions of their shows, then split advertising revenue. And, of course, companies would continue to distribute higher resolution DVD releases with extra goodies that are well worth paying for. It's the exact model that companies like Viacom are using, except in this instance the target audience would be a foreign market. All that's really necessary is a good quality sub-titled version of the series. Granted, that might cost the media companies a bit of extra money up front, but wouldn't it be worth it to curb the supposed extreme cash loss due to fansubbing?

All the Western anime fans really want is to be treated as first-class consumers, to have the same opportunities as viewers in Japan. Treat the fans well and the rewards will be great. As AD Vision CEO John Ledford once said, "The hard-core fan base is very rabid. They will get behind you as a company. You don't have to spend a dollar in marketing; you just have to be friends with them."