If you have keep up with the news regarding the crackdown on anime downloaders via the popular Bittorrent protocol, you will have seen horror news such as a 9 years old kid with his parent paying a huge payout to avoid court case.
The online communities such as Hardwarezone, VR-Zone and SGCafe, have exciting discussions on this issue.
Just recently, NCH Production has made a video on this issue.
Well, we all know that downloading copyrighted materials off the Internet is against the laws. Japanese animations, anime in short, are not available to the Singapore public or the anime community as readily as possible due to time lag in language translation and importing issues.
One of the companies here in Singapore, which holds the licenses to many animes, has started their operation to crackdown anime downloaders (most of them are young children and teenagers).
In my knowledge, anime has not infested this small red dot a decade ago. But in recent years, anime has become one of the hottest stuffs among the teenagers. In today’s broadband technology, it will take about an hour or less to get hold of the latest episode of anime just few days after the actual airing of the anime in Japan. All these are the commendable efforts from the fansubbers. Most of them works without monetary gains.
Official license holder in the country, usually produces the same anime with subtitles, in series. That means, the release might lag up to few months. Another concern is the quality of the videos and the accuracy of the translation. Many complained that the subtitles from the local distributor is of sub standard. There are a few examples published online.
The distributor need to consider the fact the anime can propagate into Singapore community is not due to chance. It is through words-to-words, man-to-man, over several years. If the distributor is taking this chance to earn quick bucks from the community, instead of building a strong long-term plan to satisfy the anime community, the short-sightedness of the company is really very short. What a company should do is to build a long term relationship with the community, instead of squeezing money out of the community. The aftermath of this incident is certainly to be a nasty one.
