Certain it seems like entitlement, but I make no assumption from there. If all you are talking about is about two sentences in my blog then I don’t really have much to say besides I might be good at trolling certain kinds of people. But at the same time, I think when you decide to air your anime on TV and make money the traditional way, you can’t expect eat your cake and have it too. Everyone is entitled to something, may it be free culture (to answer your question) or copyright protection. I think you can flip the argument either way and say you or I are making an argument from entitlement. It’s sort of meaningless criticism besides that there has to be some middle ground (ie. the public should pay up and the publishers shouldn’t hog the rights).

I’ll ask you… which “right” are you fighting for, exactly? How did you obtain a right to these fruits of other people’s hard labor? Aside from the right of nature, in which you are entitled to take it because you are capable of doing so, of course. Naturally there’s a common culture to which you can claim a right (and assuredly the current term of copyright is too long, Disney evil yadda yadda, not relevant to this discussion as we’re talking about brand new anime here!) The kind of language you’re using certainly makes Steven’s criticism, that you seem to be operating from an assumption of entitlement, seem to be accurate…

Steve: you guys should get better blogging service, but thanks for the trackback. Since I didn’t feel like signing up to make a comment on your blog I’ll just say one more thing in regards to it: you sort of have our positions down but I get the feeling “you don’t get it either.” How sad it is the day when “fighting for your right” is painted as extremist. In my perspective I’ve only stated the bare minimum. Do realize I don’t disagree with most of the arguments Avatar put up. I just think a lot of his arguments and presumptions (and especially the unstated ones) only sound good and is effective at convincing people who don’t really know much in this area, but it may or may not be actually true. There’s a lot of room for practical, empirical research, testing and exchanging of thoughts and we all can benefit from this discussion or argument or whatever.

It’s undeniable that they’re distorting the market. And while there’s a substitution and a penetration effect, they don’t work on the same titles – your hits get more sales and everything else gets shafted. Time once was when even a mediocre title would get enough sales to at least make it worth doing… you might not actually make any money off it, but it’s better than sitting around on your thumbs. Nowadays that’s not really the truth – the also-ran titles are increasingly selling so poorly that they aren’t justifying being worked on at all, even if you have idle staff to do the work!

I’d present empirical data to back that up, but that would blow my NDA out of the water. Suffice it to say that it’s a noticeable trend.