I'll play a bit of a devils advocate here. One could argue that if a product is never properly made available commercially in a region, then from a moral —but not necessarily legal— perspective it shouldn't be entitled to any copyright protection as it was never available. Piracy is also distraction for the real issues facing that industry.
The rising popularity of anime/manga in the west is significantly linked to the consumption of pirated media content released by scanlation/fansub groups. Even Crunchyroll —a site that is relatively new and brought about more legal viewing options than ever— started as a piracy site.
While nowadays there are more commercial options than a few niche players who only bring over a small sampling of series, it still is a fact that overwhelmingly most anime/manga prior to 2010 is and was never commercially available in multiple regions. In the regions it was available many products were also only partially available or heavily bowdlerized.
I feel the entire anime/manga industry is sitting on a gold mine and is too focused on blaming piracy, where the real issue is the lack of true availability for many titles. Instead of focusing on piracy they would be more successful in; doing something about Sony having a near monopoly on distribution of the entire industry's content in the west, crack down on bad localization bowdlerizing their series, and work on translating and distributing their older content.
Korean Webtoon/Manwha companies have the same identical issues faced by the Japanese Anime/Manga industries, but they are much more heavy handed with enforcement. Often to the point of unreasonableness, like going after technology neutral applications that serve legal purposes.
Kim was not the robin-hood like figure he portrayed himself to be. If anything he was the opposite given the many illegal dealings he was engaged in before creating Megaupload, and his bad reputation in some German technology communities for being a rat. Kim also in all probability is guilty. I hold no love for Kim however I can't agree with this ruling. Despite Kim's conduct; the case against him has been so rife with so much extreme police and prosecutorial misconduct it should've been thrown out ages ago.
Some of the misconduct in this case includes but is not limited to:
- Abusing the power of a national security agency to illegally spy on him, which lead to the Prime Minister being forced to publicly apologizing due to the political fallout.
- Attempting to freeze his defense funds
- Performing a no knock raid utilizing a heavily armed anti-terrorism task force for a non-violent crime, which lead to the department being successfully sued by all parties for excessive force.
- Performing an illegal search by intentionally and knowingly filling out an improper warrant, and having had the crown admit this.
- Sending the evidence ruled to be illegally obtained to the FBI regardless
- Allowing a foreign government to maliciously apply to revoke someone's bail the day they can no longer afford their lawyer
- Already ruling that under New Zealand law you cannot be extradited for copyright infringement, but proceeding with the case regardless for the more flimsy fraud charges.
Kim is a bad person who very likely is guilty, but at what point do we draw a line and say the abuse of process has been so great it harms the reputation of the legal system to proceed? Cases are routinely completely thrown out for much less. It's frankly a travesty towards the legal system that this case has been allowed to continue, especially given the charges.
The rising popularity of anime/manga in the west is significantly linked to the consumption of pirated media content released by scanlation/fansub groups. Even Crunchyroll —a site that is relatively new and brought about more legal viewing options than ever— started as a piracy site.
While nowadays there are more commercial options than a few niche players who only bring over a small sampling of series, it still is a fact that overwhelmingly most anime/manga prior to 2010 is and was never commercially available in multiple regions. In the regions it was available many products were also only partially available or heavily bowdlerized.
I feel the entire anime/manga industry is sitting on a gold mine and is too focused on blaming piracy, where the real issue is the lack of true availability for many titles. Instead of focusing on piracy they would be more successful in; doing something about Sony having a near monopoly on distribution of the entire industry's content in the west, crack down on bad localization bowdlerizing their series, and work on translating and distributing their older content.
Korean Webtoon/Manwha companies have the same identical issues faced by the Japanese Anime/Manga industries, but they are much more heavy handed with enforcement. Often to the point of unreasonableness, like going after technology neutral applications that serve legal purposes.