Japan Asks America to Help Fight Fansubbers

The Japanese government issued a formal statement of requests to the government of the United States on regulatory reform and market competition policy on October 18, and included a request for the United States to help stop the unauthorized reproduction and distribution of Japanese animation online. Specifically, the formal statement mentions the spread of Japanese animation and other materials on video-sharing sites and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.

According to Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the distribution of copyrighted materials in the United States has increasingly damaged the creative industries of Japan. Despite frequent requests to remove unauthorized material from sites with user-submitted videos, the ministry says the fundamental problem remains unresolved for the foreseeable future. The ministry also says that the high legal costs and complex procedures of copyright infringement cases against peer-to-peer file-sharing are issues.

Japanese copyright holders have been sending increasing numbers of requests to remove unauthorized material from video-sharing sites such as Google's YouTube, and anime is its own category in several sites — inside and outside the United States — that link to file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent. The issues in the statement of requests were discussed in the fourth Japan-U.S. Trade Forum meeting which was held on October 18 in Tokyo.

Source: ANN

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This might be really really bad since this might eliminate torrents from their root! Although we would still be able to get illegal copies from anime, the amount of anime being subbed would decrease tremendously. On the other hand, some people would say that the licensing companies market will increase a lot and that could lead to better quality of subs and more anime getting subbed. This could be true but, many of those companies (as we've seen before) only aim for profit and to hell with quality! They usually "just" sub popular shows rather than good ones (you can't really agree on this point unless you're an addict anime fan with good unique tastes). Let's just hope this is just some tahweesha from Japan to give itself a better position in the so-called anti-piracy war which also lead our magnificent ministry of communications to block isohunt.com.

I guess time will tell...

--Merc-chan