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Editorial: US Anime Industry and Corporate Media, What is the Problem?

by 3 Comments

After reading this particular rant, I believe that it haven’t covered the most important area. Sure, Anime have gotten cheaper, but they remain more expensive than a whole season box of a US series like Heroes or Lost which have alot more episodes and I end up spending 40-50 dollars for the whole season. Sure the days of 3 episodes on VHS for $30 or 4 episodes on a DVD is over, but this is not the main focus on this topic, The main focus is the US Anime Industry and Corporate Media.

And believe me, I buy licensed anime on shows I want to watch and my sister owns a pile of licensed DVD releases.

The editorial fails to mention about licensed anime outside the US.How about Europe? Some series will probably never get to be licensed in other countries, which leave people who want to watch the series having to import, which cost more and requires another DVD player due to region coding. DVD region coding is another problem caused by corporate media.

With corporate media, you think you own the media, but you don’t. The anime you have on your DVDs are licensed to you, not owned. This holds true with streaming media in one particular postkimaguresan posted:
Ownership: This is the elephant in the room. When you watch a streaming show, you see it, and then it’s gone.

There is no freedom with corporate media. Their interest is to license the show, distribute it and make a profit, and while you at it, restrict your fair use rights with crap like digital rights managements, region coding, streaming, and other things. There is no freedom in this model, ever. Another point with big media is that the content creator gets shafted and get a very small cut of the profits sold from these licensed DVDs. Big media companies like Funnimation and Sentai Filmworks take most of the cut from the sale of Anime DVDs which leaves the Animation studios like Shaft, Kyoto Animation and the rest with so little profits. This is the same with music labels where the music labels like EMI, Warner and others get a big cut from album and digital music sales guess what the artist or even the composer get? A very small cut from it. The problem here is corporate greed and less profits from the content creators. On top of that, the greed comes in form of high prices on price gouging on Blurays (on lesser extent, DVDs) and DRMed media. On top of that, removing DRM from your media such as DVD ripping is illegal according to the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) because using such programs circumvent Digital Rights Management. Stuff like DMCA further take away our fair use rights away. What happens if our media gets scratched up and become unreadable, do we have to buy another copy of the media? I think this is wrong because anyone should be able to back up their DVDs because we own the media already, why can’t we since “fair use” allows us to make a personal backup copy. (Note, it’s technically illegal to rip DVDs in this Real Network ruling.)

The end of the day, no matter if we own the media, we are slaves to corporate media and with streaming, our freedoms are basically gone with this and the content creator don’t benefit from this at all. The only way you can surely support the series you like is buying related merchandise such as figurines, artbooks, albums, games, etc. The merchandise they sell usually generate more money than licensed DVD releases and remains a great way to support the series you like while still buying R1 releases.

Note: I do not advocate not buying the Licensed DVDs or resorting to illegal means to obtaining “licensed” DVD releases because of some of these reasons… You should still buy R1 Licensed DVDs despite this and expressing my opinion won’t change that, I will still buy anime that is licensed.
Further Reading
kimaguresan on Crunchy and Big MediaOne License to Rule Them All

If you see this text, this site has stolen my content. If you are affected by content thieves, look this domain up on a Whois Service, look up the IP and send a DMCA takedown with the host provider. STOP STEALING CONTENT AND MAKE YOUR OWN. Also,  MATRIXAT, go fuck yourself you fucking thief!

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Author and Owner of Chikorita157’s Anime Blog and Kireina Yuri. If you want to learn more about me, see the “About chikorita157” page.

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Reader Interactions

3 Comments… read them or add your own.

  1. chikorita157 :
    February 20, 2010 at 12:28 pm • Magical Level: 3346

    Comment from Relentlessflame:

    Funimation and Sentai Filmworks hardly count as “big media” by any stretch of the word — they’re small-fry production/distribution companies in a tiny niche market. They license the content from the Japanese rights holders and pay fees for the privilege, as per their negotiated agreements. This is not at all that different from the way other merchandise rights are negotiated — when you buy a figurine, an artbook, or whatever other licensed merchandise, the money goes to the distributor, who pays the publisher, who pays the producers, who at some point either pay or paid a fee to the anime production committee for the privilege of being affiliated with the property. But it’s not as if the actual anime artists themselves or even the animation studios get a cut of the returns directly — unless the studio’s part of the production committee, they’re simply paid for the job ahead of time, like any other contract work. The money consumers spend on all merchandise — including R1 DVDs
    — goes back at some level into the pockets of the production committees, who could (or could not, I suppose) use that money to fund other anime productions. There’s no particular reason to assume that other forms of merchandise would support the industry any more than DVD sales – licensing is licensing, and in any case the production committee only gets the cut they negotiate (and, after all, this is one of the big sticking points as to why certain shows didn’t/don’t get licensed in the first place).

    The rest of the article basically amounts to ill-defined complaints about media ownership somewhat-mistakenly applied to the American anime industry as if they’re no different than the “big studios”… which is, frankly, nonsense. They’re just licensees, not giant corporate media conglomerates. If you actually wanted to complain about something related that makes more sense, you might consider looking at how the Japanese production committee players and TV stations eat away almost 90% of an anime’s budget while the studios and artists get only pennies on the dollar. But that’s more a function of the bureaucratic, traditional “big media” production system, and has not much at all to do with the concept of “home media ownership”, or the American licensees. The idea of accusing the U.S. distributors of “corporate greed” in this market where most of these companies are struggling just to make ends meet is pretty funny, actually. It’s like you imagine Funimation as a sort of Scrooge
    McDuck swimming in vaults of money they earned from gouging us “little people”; nothing could be further from the truth. (It might also interest you to know that a lot of the restrictions on price, distribution strategy, region encoding, and so on, are based on the demands of the Japanese licensors, who don’t want the North American products to hurt domestic interest in their own releases.)

    At the end of the day, ideologues aside, I really don’t think the reason people aren’t buying R1 anime DVDs has anything to do with concerns over ownership. If people really want to make a backup copy of the discs they own, they do it anyway, DMCA be damned. If they want to bypass the region coding, they do it anyway, DMCA be damned. And heck, a lot of these people probably either downloaded the fansub or watched the show on some unlicensed streaming site anyway, so they already have an accessible copy if they really want one. Instead, I assume most people are just too cheap/lazy to buy the DVDs when they’ve already seen the show, or simply don’t see the point. And perhaps some, like you, are under the mistaken believe that the American industry is greedily siphoning money away from the artists (like the music industry, apparently), so their purchase doesn’t actually do anything to help anyway. (Did you know, for example, that every view on Crunchyroll directly affects the
    money given back the specific license-holder for that show you watched?) How to get people to actually see the value in media purchasing again (or even “legal viewing behaviour”) is a big challenge faced by the entire anime industry, and clearly they have a long way to go.

    And as a closing thought, owning a DVD is not the same as owning the rights to the show, or the privilege of being able to do whatever you want with the show’s content. The “freedoms” granted under fair use are not inalienable human rights; they were granted because they made sense in that time before anyone ever thought of “the content” and “the distribution medium” as two user-separable things. Just what fair use rights are indeed “fair” nowadays is still a subject of debate, but at the end of the day media isn’t *by it’s very nature* free. It belongs to those who made it (or paid to have it made), and it’s up to them to decide the terms under which they make that content available to others, if at all. Our option as consumers is, of course, to not buy what they’re selling, but if you make this sort of decision under a false pretense you’re certainly not doing anyone any favours. I think these issues are too important for us to allow them to be blurred into some giant
    poorly-defined blob, as you basically did in this editorial/rant. It makes it *seem like* you’re just looking for any excuse to not pay anything for what you watch, and I’m not sure *that’s* really “fair” either. There needs to be a balance.

    Reply
  2. chikorita157 :
    February 20, 2010 at 12:28 pm • Magical Level: 3346

    Comment from RyanA:

    @relentlessflame yo yo! Yea, what you explained in the first paragraph, the complications of the “middle men” are plain unattractive imo. Things are how they are, but I think people in the industry should be looking for more independent means for production and distribution; doujin. Not that every work should be gone about in a more “intimate” relation with end-users, but even raising a small percentage of series done in “indie” fashion could set a good example of how artists and creators can fully manifest a work without needing to be in the “corporate” model; regardless of the size of the companies.

    you might consider looking at how the Japanese production committee players and TV stations eat away almost 90% of an anime’s budget while the studios and artists get only pennies on the dollar.

    Sucks so bad… very discouraging when people want to support those that are actually doing the work…. media companies are kinda cock-blocking any sort of closeness the creators and end-users might have O.o But that’s just my opinion of why there’s something wrong.

    So…

    Funny thing about all this is that I don’t think anyone is trying to argue against not making legal purchases of affiliated content/items. Seemingly, it’s boiling down to “what’s wrong with this model?” or “how can we support creators to a greater extent?” … and with the broadcasters, et al taking their big chunk, it’s feels quite discouraging from the start. Going into it with localized issues doesn’t really get to the core issue imo. Ultimately, consumers have choices, though what they do with them might not fully reflect their personal opinions… people bought blood diamonds unknowingly, and had they more knowledge maybe they would have not made those purchases.

    O.o having these sort of entries, even if misinformed or in the wrong direction, are good. Get points out there, let them breath, get others to read and discuss and we can build more knowledge. Sadly, I don’t think most anime consumers care about that extra knowledge, or even supporting the artists 🙁

    Where is the Bandcamp for everyone? lol
    .-= Ryan A´s last blog ..Getting to Know Buzz =-.

    Reply
  3. chikorita157 :
    February 20, 2010 at 12:29 pm • Magical Level: 3346

    Comment from Robert S.:

    There are several reasons for teh problems facing anime. Most of them come from bad business decisions from the past.

    To be successful, anime has to provide something that domestic media doesn’t or can’t provide. Anime must also be market towards people who will buy them (young to middle age adults).. No anime company does this.
    .-= Robert S.´s last blog ..President's Day Show Canned =-.

    Reply

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