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http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2 ... next-month

In cooperation with 15 major anime production companies and manga publishers, the Japanese government will next month start a huge extermination operation against 580 foreign sites which have illegally uploaded anime and manga contents on the web without the copyright holders' permission, NHK reported on July 28. While the government has started supporting the genre as one of their important cultural exports, there appears to be no end of illegal uploading of anime and manga via pirate sites, mainly operated by Chinese. The Cultural Affairs Agency estimates the loss caused by the Chinese pirate sites last year was amounted to at least 560 billion yen (about US$ 5.5 billion).



Wonder how that'll go...

I always wonder how they calculate the figures for the money that's "lost". Like, do they operate on the basis that every single view is a person not buying the DVD release or whatever? Do they acknowledge the fact that a good proportion of the people who watch anime online go on to buy the DVD, and either watched it online first as a taste test or watched it online because it was not yet available in their region or they couldn't afford to buy it yet? Do they acknowledge that some online viewers can't legally buy the anime/manga in their region at all because of the lack of an official translation or marketing?

Besides, that money isn't "lost". It still exists, it's just being spent on other things. Which might well include overseas shipping of merchandise for an anime that you can't find in your country, but watched online and loved. Or maybe it's been used to buy food, because you just don't have the spare cash to spend on anime, but you keep watching it online and loving it and planning to buy the DVD set one day when you've got more money.

There are a good number of douchebags who download stuff they could fully afford to buy, but online translators have been exporting anime and manga for far longer than the Japanese government has been behind it, in many cases for free, and access to free online translations is likely a major factor in why there's a western market for anime and manga at all.

Monsi already made a thread about this: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=12453

pfft, what type of asshole would watch anime on a site that isn't legally allowed to show it :p