Alright, let’s face it, all of us from time to time have had to watch our favourite animes and mangas through pirated websites. The reason for piracy for the most part is quite simple actually. For example, although a good quality of animes is available in countries like the USA, UK, New Zealand, and Australia, for the other countries, however, things are quite different.
In most of countries, popular sites like Funimation, Viz Media and Crunchyroll first of all do not exist. Second of all the content availability is a lot less as compared to the original founder countries, mostly because the animes haven’t been licensed in the country yet. This leaves the anime and manga fans no choice but to rely on the pirated site to satiate their need to watch their favorite show online.
However, as much as the fans all love the content, we must also take a look at the hard work of the content creators, and how us relying on pirated sites might be causing big losses to the ones who are providing us such wonderful form of entertainment.
According to the official reports, in 2021 the Japanese entertainment industry lost over $6.92 billion dollars in revenue to piracy and in total made only $5.19 billion dollars in sales and profits. Highlighting how big the piracy problem actually is. Not only is the industry losing more than it is making, but it is also the number one reason why our artists and the people behind the screens are not paid adequately for their hardwork.
Therefore to crackdown piracy, big corporations like Kodansha, Shueisha, Aniplex,Toei Animation, and many more have come together to urge the governments of the world to put a ban on pirated websites, and many of our readers know that their plan, for the most part, has come to fruition. With many popular sites being forced to shut down and fined for piracy.
However, as long as the content isn’t universally available to each and every fan out there, I’m afraid to say that the end of piracy might just be a very long battle. I mean even on Netflix and Amazon Prime, not every piece of content is available in all the countries which is the main reason why many of the fans are forced to commit piracy.
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The truth is what we really need is global platform which provides everyone with all the content on reasonable prices. However, until and unless sites like Crunchyoll and Funimation and Viz-Media don’t amp up their games, the end of piracy might just be a pipe dream.
However, in recent years the Japanese content creators have realised the lack of content availability to the global audience and have launched sites like Manga Plus by Shueisha an app which makes free manga content available globally, a very good initiative in my perspective. Therefore, hopefully in future with efforts like these maybe pirace will come to an end!