There are many things that could be considered copyright infringement in the Internetworked world today. Anything from listening the neighbor radio on last.fm to watching newsclips from youtube. And all of these people infringing are really paying in a form or another.

I use last.fm, youtube, bittorrent (fansubs, gnu/linux) and other p2p technologies daily and yes, most of it could be considered infringement. The conflict here is, my CD-collection, DVD-collection and bookshelf are full of _legally purchased_ CD’s, DVD’s and books. And I still continue to buy copyrighted stuff, last of which was the Paprika DVD, which was broken. I can not play it on GNU/Linux so I will have to infringe some copyrights and break the CSS DRM (Dreaded Rights Management) while I rip the bastard DVD and make a working copy.

And if you want to preserve something that’s really important, like some controversial news footage that’s being suppressed by some fascist and oppressive governments, piracy is really the only way. Too many really important video materials have recently disappeared from places like archive.org, youtube or google video. One can be almost certain they can be found from The Pirate Bay or other such bastions of freedom.

Some people have left comments on forums and other websites stating that they’ve never bought an anime at all. That’s really sad.
There are people out there who bought a lot, but they’re not a big group.

Anything from ANN is going to be industry focused because they’re sponsored by the industry. However, what this Sevakis guy says is basically correct, and you’re right – basically American fans are more savvy and simply won’t pay for these things, especially if they can get it off the net for free.

Well, yeah, so far this season is a little flat. But I believe the pace is being picked up, even the recent Gundam 00 episode is a little better (although one scene reminded me of the confrontation between Heero Yui and Relena Dorian/Peacecraft in GW).

Mike: Thanks for pointing that out. I guess I wasn’t looking at the TOP OF THE PAGE, which might have been because I was writing it at 4:30 in the morning. I fixed the name and the article link in your comment (was off by a number).

robin: I share a similar sentiment in terms of buying things I’ll be likely to go back to in the future or use in a video project.

The overlicensing of titles, many of which were bad, by ADV and some other licensors was a major contributing factor to the saturated market of about 4-5 years ago. It seems that if the various companies will have to pick and choose a bit more with their licenses if they wish to uphold a standard of quality.

Similar to your fellow bloggers, I am finding that the quality of shows worth downloading to watch every season has dropped significantly. When I used to follow a dozen different shows, now I only follow one or two. Which in turn means that when all these crap shows eventually get licensed, there’s nothing for me to buy – hence, the decline of DVD sales.