The Sports Nippon newspaper reports that Kyoto's High-Tech Crime Task Force has arrested a 43-year-old self-employed man named Noriaki Matsumoto on Thursday for allegedly uploading anime online, without the copyright holders' permission, using the Perfect Dark file-sharing software...
Well, if the industry wants to kill piracy, the uploaders are the people to target.
Get rid of those guys, though, and I have a feeling the overseas market would suffer, as a great many of us rely upon pirated video to determine what to buy, what to be interested in, etc. God knows, I'd never have fallen in love with Macross, Galactic Heroes, Clannad, Patlabor, Spice & Wolf or Aria if not for piracy.
Whoa I've been away from Shinbun in a while but it appears as if things are getting quite serious. I'm guessing they are trying to quell the uploading as much as possible so that sales at least rise a bit more?
They're not exactly targeting the overseas fan market with this. Most fansub groups haven't used Perfect Dark to get their raws for a long time now, and there's a lot more reliance on dedicated cappers who give their raws to only those fansub groups. What's really being targeted here is the Japanese domestic market. The profit margins on DVD's and Blu-Ray's there are significantly higher, and the caps appearing on Perfect Dark really do bite into their sales. Of course, perhaps the real problem there isn't that there's pirates, but that the ridiculously high prices for even standard editions are driving people to piracy. They'd be better off reducing the prices on discs and hiking them slightly on all the merchandise IMO.