Fansub
Under Torrents ( portmanteau from English. Fan and subtitle , subtitles ) refers to foreign language film or television productions of fans in their own work with subtitles are provided and disseminated.
Development and distribution channels
Fansubs were first created around the mid-1980s (e.g. the first English-language anime fansub was recorded in 1986) and were initially passed on mainly in the form of VHS cassettes that were copied many times, then increasingly as themselves from the beginning of the 1990s burned CD-ROMs . The handover took place in person or by post.
From around the end of the 1990s, the production and distribution of fansubs increasingly shifted to the Internet . Such “digital fansubs”, often produced by multinational groups and distributed via P2P (e.g. via BitTorrent ), are also known as DigiSubs .
Ethical claim
Some of the fansubbers follow a code of conduct, the basic idea of which is that fansubs should not compete with commercial publications. In the course of this, those fansub creators then demand that their fansubs be given for free or at cost price, that distribution be stopped as soon as the work becomes commercially available in the language in question, or that the original is purchased as soon as it is commercially available is.
Legal situation
From a legal point of view, fansubs represent an unauthorized modification or distribution of copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holder and are then illegal - even if the original has not yet been licensed in the corresponding language area.
Japanese anime fansubs
In the case of Japanese anime, licensees are increasingly demanding on their own initiative to stop the distribution of fansubs. There are also cases where licensees not only provide against that, but also take legal action against downloading anime fansubs.
In the past, the Japanese anime copyright holders tacitly tolerated the availability of fansubs as they were seen as a boost to awareness and a legal process was seen as too complicated and costly. In December 2004, however, the Japanese anime studio Media Factory Inc. , announcing legal action, requested US fansub creators not to produce any more fansubs of their series, and in December 2006 a consortium of the Japanese entertainment industry asked the video portal YouTube to do so remove Japanese copyrighted images and footage from the site. In October 2007, the Japanese government formally asked the US government for assistance in combating the spread of anime fansubs on the Internet. (In Japan itself, fansubs are illegal: In December 2008, for the first time, a Japanese man who had subtitled a recent US movie with Japanese subtitles and made it available online for free was sentenced to two years probation. The probation period is three years. )
There are US license companies who believe that anime fansubs are damaging the American and Japanese anime industries. While Japanese anime artists and directors did not previously make their opinions public about anime fansubs, warnings have been issued from these circles for some time that the rapid and unlimited distribution of fansubs is increasingly causing economic damage to the Japanese anime industry.
The attitude towards fansubs in the German anime industry is inconsistent: The German licensee OVA Films saw more of a problem in illegally offered so-called “DVD rips”, ie illegally created and distributed copies of official DVD publications. Tokyopop, on the other hand, explicitly stated fansubs at the beginning of 2008 as the reason for only completing open anime series, but not releasing any new series on DVD until further notice.
The Anime Copyright Alliance (ACA) was founded in 2010 with the aim of removing illegal copies of anime licensed in Germany from online platforms. For this purpose, the website offers a reporting form for corresponding videos. It is important for the position of the fansubbers that representatives of the anime industry as well as fan sub and anime portals as well as specialist magazines are jointly committed to combating the illegal distribution of licensed anime.
From 2014 fansubs lost more and more popularity in German-speaking countries. This is partly due to the increased licensing in the German-speaking area. Legal providers such as Crunchyroll , Anime on Demand , Wakanim and Clipfish (later Watchbox ) are increasingly displacing the fansubs with their sometimes free offerings. Most animes are offered on the platforms as simulcasts or offset by seven days from the Japanese release. After it became known that Crunchyroll was taking action against German fansub groups subbing licensed Crunchyroll animes, fewer and fewer fansubs were published and several fansub groups disbanded.
See also
swell
- ↑ Timeline of Anime Development in the USA ( Memento of the original from August 18, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English), AnimeNation News Blog from August 15, 2008
- ^ A New Ethical Code for Digital Fansubbing , Anime News Network, June 8, 2003
- ↑ Legality of Fansubs , Anime News Network, June 8, 2003
- ^ Anxious times in the cartoon underground (dead), CNET News.com, February 2, 2005.
- ↑ Singapore Company Cracks Down on Anime Downloads , Anime News Network, June 7, 2007.
- ↑ JASRAC press release of December 4, 2006.
- ↑ Japan Asks America to Stop Illegal Net Releases of Anime , Anime News Network, October 23, 2007.
- ↑ Japan convicts 1st pirate subtitler ( Memento of the original from December 21, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English), Variety.com, December 16, 2008.
- ↑ ADV representative Matt Greenfield on Anime Fansubs (English) at the US event "Anime Central", May 2007.
- ↑ Anime director Shinichiro Watanabe expresses himself critical of anime fansubs (dead) - US event "Oni-Con", October 20, 2007.
- ↑ Interview with Ralf Rehkopf, Marketing and Product Manager at OVA Films. Retrieved May 19, 2008 .
- ↑ Anime - legal, illegal, doesn't matter? Interview with a fan subber. sumikai.com, September 23, 2018, accessed September 13, 2019 .
- ↑ Crunchyroll Germany takes harder action against fansubs. anime2you, March 29, 2018, accessed September 13, 2019 .
