The conclusion of this article addresses somewhat your concerns. I think from an ethical “is this wrong” aspect a lot of the times people are justifying and rationalizing selfish behavior. Which is why on some level, you have to engage people who are at least having this discussion on good faith, and realize that they may be doing just that unknowingly.

But, like I said, I’m not interested in this religion–I’ve already got one. Anime is a business. So no culture-shifting massive lobbing “don’t copy this floppy” bullshit for me. What gets my money are people who take advantage of modern technology and use it in a way that is a win-win, middle or otherwise.

I think your consternation comes from framing things too specifically in a certain way. I mean I don’t know what to say about it besides that even in VHS days, dubs:subs was like 8:1 in terms of sales. Back then people paid to watch and own anime, fansub included, even through tape trading and later on via SASE purchasing. (Old man time: I spent more getting my Kenshin TV fansubs than how much they are now on DVD.) But little of that money goes into the anime production companies. Still people are willing to spend. Just like how people are willing to pay big bucks to go to cons but not on DVDs. The numbers do show that a lot of people who watch a lot of anime end up putting more money back to the system than those who don’t. But a lot of people don’t or only do it casually. It’s really the middleman’s job to square that stuff away and figure out where the opportunity is, I guess. Fans may know some of that first-hand, but that’s that.

Sure, I’m inclined to write off people who don’t pay. I mean, basically, people who don’t pay don’t pay. It’s not really my concern to figure out why not, and I’m not sure whose it is, if it is anyone’s. They get what they paid for. In a lot of cases “they get what they paid for” literally mean terabytes and terabytes of storage, they would spend thousands on computer hardware but not on the anime on them. Now if they want to pay for anime and don’t have an outlet to do so, that’s a different issue. Or if we can give them that mind trick so they spend some of that hardware money into anime, hey, win-win in both people’s books. This is why a lot of us like Steam and Crunchyroll. Because those operations didn’t quite write all of them off, because they serve a legit need that wasn’t being served by middlemen framing the issue too narrowly and missing the big picture (and potential $). It’s not a surprise they aren’t concerned about piracy. Because if you believe dollar democracy, just like bootlegging, they’re just economics 101 stuff, signs of market inefficiencies.

I think rethinking that is one of the fundamental things all of R1 industry should be working on. Something new media businesspeople have been for decades. It’s not to say that should be a strategy they should pursue, but to me it’s a huge missed opportunity, for example, that we haven’t had one of the main R1 companies put on their own con, or one in conjunction with some 3rd party. Or other tracks of highly curated, very vertical ways to integrate traditional money outlets into their marketing efforts. I’m sure GSC would be elated to work with Viz about Accel World, for example. If there’s any money there.

I’m starting to think that it’s not so much that R1 doesn’t want to cater to us, but that our pickiness on literalness of translation and karaoke subs and fonts and true-simultaneous simulcast, combineed with our insistence on “punishing” R1 for not being perfect, made us a demographic that wouldn’t let R1 cater to us in the first place– the hardcore fans who will actually buy things AND tell R1 their list of greivances just pales in comparison to the semi-casuals who just want to relax and watch a dub. Then we either feel upset that we’re being cut out or decide to give up on R1 and devote our lives to piracy.

The more I read this paragraph, the more I feel this reads like a good reason to punish the R1. Because let’s face it, if we can count Aniplex USA, Nozomi and Discotek, what exactly is the R1 industry again? Certainly not Funimation…? Or are they? Is “anime industry” just plastic discs? Do we count plastic figures? Manga? Games? Dragon Age? I don’t think anyone actually complained about the Kara no Kyoukai box in terms of quality and sub-literalness, for example. The problem, to me, is more with FUNi who are determined to serve casual fans first–which is why I think they put on the best marketing, since we’re talking about the semi- or full-casuals who don’t even know what shows they would like to watch. Because they have to dub everything for that group, it really limits what titles they can release. Just off-the-cuff, NISA admits at their NYCC panel that they would have to sell through 5 times their current sales of a specific title in order to justify a dub of any of their titles (I’m assuming this is on average). But that’s their business model. Sure, people complain about their stuff, but the reality of it is more about the size of the market and how many people are buying the stuff.

But is that really a problem? Not really. Should fans whine about it? It’s certainly not on the top of do-not-whine list. I mean, try talking to Key fans who bitches about Little Buster not being animated by Kyoani for a change, all this Animuindustri whining will seem really quaint.

I really don’t want to be in the business of forcing people to buy stuff they don’t like. Even if they’re pirating it. Because I understand what drives people to pirate things, and while often times it’s cheapness, or feeling of entitlement, but it also has do with their upbringing and where they are in life. I have a friend who makes wall street money and still hoards pirated anime like a 16yo. Does he give a damn? Not really. And until we change anime from “industry” to “religion” I’m not sure we should. He values his convenience by far, and that’s where most have fallen far short.

(My friend is a particularly good example, in that if the cops caught him I wouldn’t really feel too bad about it, because he kinda deserves it, and has the money to fend it off. Not that he’s done anything what I’d say is morally wrong, but he really has no regards for copyright law and is just doing it because he could. But he is pretty much the ideal example where it is not a pity case–he just has a different set of values about spending money on possessions that are not life’s necessities. And the most wonderful thing would be some middleman who comes along and provides a better use case than him keeping terabytes of local storage in his apartment. Doing the math, if CR serves all the anime he needs, he would spend much more money on storage over 10 years than he does on a $60/yr subscription)

Of course fans are self-sufficient, but I would still say they can’t expect their lack of participation to have no adverse effects, even if it’s all very indirect. This obviously applies more the Japanese industry though.

I remember reading about American young adults (…in the 1970s) learning about Japan and Japanese as a matter of getting into the marketplace–as enterprising business people doing business or manufacturing or finance and what not. This is kind of the core issue here.