CoffeeBear.net

Don’t take away my fansubs!

Posted by Mark | Filed under DVDs, Links

I’m a bit of an anime fan. I’ve bought many a VHS tape, Laser Disc and DVD in my time and I plan to buy many more… unless the anime stu­dios shut­down the fan­sub­bers. For those of you who might not be famil­iar with the world of fan­subs; here’s the def­i­n­i­tion of a fan­sub from Wikipedia:

Fan­sub — short for “fan sub­ti­tled”; a copy of a for­eign movie or tele­vi­sion show (most often anime) which has been sub­ti­tled by “fans” into their native lan­guage. This has been done to pro­vide shows that would oth­er­wise be unavail­able in one’s native lan­guage, but with the growth in the pop­u­lar­ity of anime, fan­subs’ pur­pose has expanded to include pro­grams that would be com­mer­cially unvi­able (I.e. older or niche appeal mar­ket titles.) in one’s coun­try or sim­ply to reduce the amount of time one would wait to see a par­tic­u­lar pro­gram. Also, many Amer­i­can anime view­ers feel there is too much cen­sor­ship of anime broad­cast on TV, espe­cially in scenes related to nudity, which is com­mon in Japan (even in children’s shows) but is typ­i­cally con­sid­ered inap­pro­pri­ate in the United States.

I mostly get my fan­subs from online sources via Bit­Tor­rent¹. This allows me to:

• Judge if a series will be worth the money to buy once a U.S. dis­trib­uter starts sell­ing it here.
• See some of those niche shows that no dis­trib­uter will bring over.

Given that I quite often am not fond of the “main­stream” anime that is brought over and that my bud­get is lim­ited; being able to view the series com­pletely via fan­subs is a vital part of my process for decid­ing what series I will buy. If the anime stu­dios force the fan­sub­bers to stop their work; then I’ll be forced to spend my money else­where. Harsh, but I’ve already bought my share of crappy anime and I’m not will­ing to shell out ~$20/disc in the hopes that a given series won’t suck.

Oh and in case you were curi­ous, this arti­cle over on C|Net prompted my post.

¹ If you’re inter­ested in more info on this; leave a com­ment and I’ll see about writ­ing some­thing up.

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