3 Anime Pirates Arrested for Uploading Caps to Share
Friday 9 May 2008 @ 10:05 am | By tskillerIf you're new here and you like what you see, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed, and browse around for more fun stuff. Thanks for visiting!
It seems America isn’t the only place that the police is cracking down on media pirates. The “Kyoto Prefectural Police’s High-Tech Crime Task Force” recently arrested three well known anime video cappers that were allegedly uploading recordings of most popular anime television shows to the Japanese P2P network, Share. If you have watched a few fansubs in the past couple of years, chances are the raw video came from one of these guys. While it is currently legal in Japan to download unauthorized copies for personal use, it is not legal to upload them.







Well as it is speculations, if not what actually happened, was that Sunrise had issues with P2P spread of anime supposedly due to a leak of footage for episode 3 and low viewership of Code Geass R2. The latter is moot though as the airing timeslot of CGR2 is pretty bad (Sunday evening, and CGR2 isn’t something you sit around and watch with your family), and it’s been a year since the first season aired so the heat’s probably already pretty much died off. Most of the news reports only point specifically to Gundam 00 and Geass R2 if at all, besides large volumes of anime.
Needless to say they’d always tie it back up to poor viewership of anything else and poor DVD sales when it comes down to justifying it for any other studio and company. It is important to note that at this point Sunrise has access to online streaming through Bandai Channel, and GONZO has plans for cheap streamed episodes (I think), but most other companies and series would probably suffer from the lack of proliferation should this cause a breakdown in the share network.
Companies need to embrace this instead of fighting the trend. I think GONZO is doing the right thing by opening up to the internet.
I agree with Nahu. If it wasn’t for people like them I would have never gotten into anime. I buy what I can when I can. Hopefully they will figure it out something better soon.
I can’t afford all the anime I want to see, but I buy what I can and download the rest.