...Haunting...

Loose Ends and Stalling: Steve Argyle's Fanservice: Happy Sod Off SOPA Day!

When we make decisions, there’s always some measure of struggle between reason and emotion. Our ideal versus reality. And it always gives me a hearty chuckle to see folks trying to lay the hammer down hard on one side of that see-saw, and then be shocked when the other side pops up, sending a…

Personally, I don’t think downloading stuff for personal use is bad. I do it all the time, but if I support something, I do my best to really spend to support it. Like in MTG, I don’t play in tournaments and I mostly just do it with friends so I could easily just print stuff and use those, but that doesn’t stop me from buying boxes of sets that I believe are good or from purchasing original sleeves or mats, because I want to show my support in some way, shape or form.

Same goes to music, videos, and movies. Sure, I might “pirate” certain songs or movies for personal use but if I actually find the Blu-Ray of a movie that I absolutely loved, I don’t mind shelling out cash.

My biggest concern on this whole “anti-piracy” act is that it’s terrible for people like us who have no other way of obtaining content. How else do most of us here get to watch the Anime we love? Isn’t it through the internet? Through these “pirates” who take the raws from somewhere and add the subs to it and then distribute them for free? For people outside of Japan, that’s how most of us get to watch the shows we like. We can’t always rely on American companies to license anime for distribution because there are shows that just won’t be “profitable” to license in their POV. (Plus, dubbing sucks.)

The same goes for Manga. Without the numerous scanlation teams all over the interwebs, reading manga would be impossible for anyone outside of Japan barring being very fluent in Japanese.

What are the repercussions of this, you may ask. The biggest and most obvious thing that could happen is that sales of certain products would drop. Without the Scanlation teams or the Subbers all over the internet pumping out free content, so many people would be oblivious to anime and manga. If that happened, less people would compose the committed fanbase of certain anime and manga. With less of a fanbase, paraphernalia, PVC statues, Figma figurines, and the like would drop in sales. People would stop importing them and eventually would only be known to a very select few. Lets face it, Anime being free to watch and Manga being free to read is making their fanbase explode exponentially all over the globe, and this helps the sales of other industries.

In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need piracy because the people who actually make the content would be able to distribute their works to each and every country in the world. Manga companies like Shonen Jump! would actually hire the scanlation staff and create an english mirror of their magazine to distribute throughout the entire world at the same time of their releases in Japan. Too bad we don’t live in a perfect world.

Source: steveargyle.com