How Japanese Anime house Gonzo avoided pirating by dropping DRM
Here is a reader contribution from author Eugene Woodbury.
Gonzo versus the pirates
The Anime Almanac reports here and here on how Japanese anime studio Gonzo beat Internet piracy by abandoning DRM. Rather, they responded quickly with a quality product at a reasonable price that was easy to download. This seems painfully obvious, but as Scott VonSchilling points out, getting media execs to grasp the obvious can be painfully difficult.
I’ve long wondered why anime studios didn’t crank out a subtitle/dub script at the same time they finished the Japanese master (what U.S. studios do with closed caption scripts). Even in Japan, it’d be a blip in the budget. Mostly, VonSchilling explains, because the importance of quickly addressing demand in a wired world hadn’t occurred to them.
This reminds me of an anecdote related by David Halberstam in The Reckoning, about the decline of Detroit and the rise of the Japanese auto industry during the 1970s. Upon hearing that Americans were using light pickups to commute to work, Nissan’s reaction was that “Americans had no right to use [Nissan pickups] to drive to work, particularly to offices!”
Of course, the proper reaction was: “Who cares? Sell them more!” Which they eventually came around to.
When I first lived in Japan 25 years ago, Hollywood movies showed up in Japan several months after debuting in the English-speaking world. Now big Hollywood releases often debut in Japan. The prepping of television series like C.S.I for international release takes place at breakneck speed. Hollywood has at least figured out that part of the equation.
Editor’s note: Here is an excerpt from the links to the Anime Almanac that Eugene provided above:
In a way, anime has already become the poster child of the power of the internet. Unfortunately, it has done so by the elaborate system of pirating and illegal distribution. When a new anime is aired on Japanese TV, fans take a digital recording of the broadcast and add subtitles to the show in their own native language. These “fansubs” are then illegally redistributed over the internet for others to find and watch very easily. Bittorrent tracking sites and other meccas of illegal downloads contain sections dedicated specifically to anime and distinguish it separately from domestic TV and film.
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… the Japanese company GDH, which many are familiar with as the anime studio Gonzo, made an announcement that is going to change everything about anime and the internet.
Gonzo’s two newest series, The Tower of DRUAGA and BLASSREITER will be simultaneously released online with English subtitles the same day as it is broadcasted on Japanese TV. Starting later this week, viewers all over the world will be able to see the two show streaming for free on the popular site YouTube.com, or they can purchase a DRM-free video download from the newcomer service BOST TV.
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Last week, I made the pretty bold claim that Gonzo studio was about to change everything with their new release model for the Tower of Druaga and BLASSREITER. On Friday and Saturday, Gonzo followed through on their promise by releasing the shows’ premiere episodes online immediately following their broadcast on Japanese TV. English-speaking fans all over the world could watch the subtitled video for free on YouTube, or they could pay to download a video copy that was not restricted by copy-protection on Crunchyroll or BOST TV.
So how did Gonzo do on their first week of this experiment?
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By allowing users to view their shows in either a free or non-DRM’ed video, Gonzo had stopped that immediate need for normal fansubbers to pirate their shows, and thus were able to control the way their content was being viewed by a majority of the viewers. This allowed the company to actually do some monitoring and statistics, something they could never do with fansubs. They can now see how many views each episode receive, how many viewers return to watch more of the series, and what viewers are saying about the show through comments and other feedback.
January 8th, 2009 at 11:48 am
This is really, really cool.
Up to this point, most animé companies have seen external markets as an afterthought—they made their shows for consumption in Japan, and didn’t much care about anywhere else. That’s why fansubbers were more or less left alone from the ’80s up through the late ’90s.
Certainly that’s why the Macross rights situation in Japan is messed up right now—one of the original studios sold international distribution rights for a song, and the other studio has been disputing whether or not they had those rights to sell.
(I would be inclined to note, by the way, that “Japanese animé” is a redundancy, because “animé” means “Japanese animation.” But that’s a long-running argument with no clear winner.
March 16th, 2009 at 6:50 am
Wow.. thanks for this excellent news ^_^ Going to spread this news around, especially that here in the Philippines, the PAPT (Pilipinas Anti-Piracy Team) recently announced that they are targetting downloaders and sharers next.
(@Chris Meadows: It is similar to say that “animé” is wrong because there is no “é” in Nihongo :p Animation in Nihongo is “animeeshon” if correctly written in romaji.
If we transliterate the Japanese animeeshon character-by-character, it will be “anime-shon” or syllabicate it “a.ni.me-.sho.n”.)