davemerrill wrote:
I can easily see where you're in their position, you have the anime, people want the anime, you are pretty much the only way they're going to get that anime, why not make a buck off it? I mean, that's an ethical line I won't cross, but I can see how people rationalized themselves into crossing it.
Anyway, seeing as how we spent the 80s and half the 90s making unauthorized copies of everything for all comers, we aren't really standing on any moral high ground. We didn't make a buck off it, that's all we can say.
Anyway, thanks for this Usamimi!!
It's a paid capitalist service for its time, I really don't blame the guys who were doing fansubs at the time as their only source of income or as a part time gig. If there's a need to be meet that with the minimum chance of getting caught with legal actions, you ride that train till it runs outta steam or gets derailed. With physical media you needed some compensation for buying material to send the mail since there was no way people can use the anime on their computers since not everyone had one 20 or so years ago. I understand the business side of things for those reasons, until the legal system comes into play. There's so much anime fandom has done illegally than fansubs, such as one story where the anime con Gainax was hosting in the states back in the early 90's brought their employees over to work at the con, which was a federal violation since they were handling american currency and needed green cards for that. If caught, they would've been immedietelly deported. Then again, this is Gainax were talking about.
The only difference in how fansubbers operate today compared to 20 and 30 years ago is that most current ones want donations for their digisubs because they don't like how the official ones are translated to their elitist understanding of Japanese. Everything is pretty much licensed or will be eventually with a high chances of it happening, where as back then fans didn't think the stuff they found cool would never be released. There's still some titles that meet that need for obscure anime that may or may not be touched for years or if ever based on licensing issues or that no one has the license. It's a fine line to walk, but at least now there's no reason to fansub for financial gain and should be done out of pure love by the subbers.
I feel like this deserves a mockumentary style movie to spoof the events, in the style of Scarface storytelling. As in, I need to get started on that script asap.
