Pirate content now and then

Crunchyroll, for pirated anime content

From onw new article published in 2007

Crunchyroll, a sharing site primarily for anime, is attracting attention — not only for its content and fast-growing popularity, but also for its revenue model.

Rather than just putting up ads, Crunchyroll accepts “donations” in return for providing users with higher video quality. The site makes a respectable $75,000 a month in revenue, according to Techcrunch. But it’s also getting money for copyrighted anime content uploaded to the site (much of which apparently uploaded by the site owners) plainly violates the DMCA.

Pirated content isn’t all that makes the company notable. The site also makes its mark with niche content from foreign markets. While there’s plenty of noise about the global reach of the internet, language barriers still exist, keeping ideas and content from flowing as freely as they otherwise would. Crunchyroll gets around the problem by using fansubs, or foreign-language versions of anime subtitled by fans.

Many of the anime series on Crunchyroll, without the efforts of fans, would never have otherwise been dubbed and released in English-language markets. But the site’s growing popularity could be its downfall. The question is where anime distributors and licensors draw the line. Some anime that gets US distribution has already been removed from Crunchyroll. Cowboy Bebop, Gundam Wing and Dragon Ball Z, three of the most popular series, all bear removal notices stating that they are licensed by Bandai Entertainment and FUNimation Entertainment.

While other content remains, it seems unlikely that venture capitalists or buyers will be willing to touch Crunchyroll until companies and organizations based in Asia, like the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Performers, indicate whether they’ll take action against the company. Past experience indicates that they will — last October, Youtube removed almost 30,000 videos at the request of a group of Japanese businesses, and the JSRACP regularly criticizes YouTube for its slowness in removing Japanese-language content.

Additionally, Crunchyroll risks action from foreign licensors. Singapore and the Philippines each account for more than 20 percent of the site’s million-plus monthly unique viewers, according to Alexa — countries where artist’s organizations have been active in stamping out illegal sharing. Crunchyroll, semi-anonymously run out of San Francisco by unnamed employees of Hot or Not, likely won’t find itself able to hide behind local courts, as the Russian music vendor AllofMP3 has so far.

As Crunchyroll waits to learn the fate of its videos, it may yet be building the foundations for its future success — a huge base of anime-obsessed users. Like YouTube, Crunchyroll has some user-created content, mainly in the form of anime music videos (AMVs), which combine cut-scenes from animes with music (Note: These contents are also considered to be illegal under Japanese copyright law).

Even if the content that originally drew users eventually disappears, it may be possible for Crunchyroll to hold onto a portion of its users and become a social sharing site. (Skip) Crunchyroll could yet make arrangements with internet-savvy Asian companies whose content would never have otherwise reached outside markets.

Of course, Crunchyroll shares another similarity to YouTube: As the largest site of its kind, it is the first that licensors will go after. Meanwhile, smaller competitors likeAnimecrave.com , which has an inferior site design but keeps all its videos behind a pay wall, can continue to offer content no longer on Crunchyroll. And, as always, the more popular series are available through sites that make no bones about having links to illegal content, like tv-links.co.uk.

Youtube to offer copyright holders to monetize from pirate content

From one news article published in 2009

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Now Youtube offers Contents ID system that can automatically detect and identify audio and video contents. It identifies contents in uploaded files from contrast of visuals or change of speed.

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Mr. Tokuma (Senior Product manager at Youtube Japan): “Now users upload 15hours-long videos per minute on Youtbe, so it’s crucial to set up a system to efficiently detect copyright-infringing contents. Youtube is the first website that adapt such a big-scale system in order to achieve this.”

Youtube now offers 3 opitions for partner companies to deal with copyright infringing contents.
1. “Block”: To stop uploading contents before it’s published
2. “Track”: To track information about how many of their contents are illegally uploaded, but not block them.
3. “Monetize “: Copyright holders can put advisement on illegally uploaded contents whose copyrights are owned by them, and make profit  from it.
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Mr. Tokuma introduced one example of those “Monetized” contents uploaded by users. This video titled “Suzumiya Haruhi no Kishimen” was uploaded by an user which has advertisement put by Kadokawa Publishing co. Profit made from advertisements on this content belong to Kadokawa co. while the uploader can keep the content on Youtube despite it’s infringing copyright of Kadokawa co.

Mr. Tokuma also introduced a new monetizing system, for partner companies, which has been applied in Youtube America, that identify contents of videos uploaded by users and show up link to Amazon’s page where viewer can purchase matched products. “We will propose further ways to incorporate user-uploaded youtube contents into business, if they think putting links to purchase pages will increase sales of their products.”

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