I agree completely. And a boycott on ANN now is silly, as they have been doing a new season anime preview for years. A quick google in their site came up with a Summer 2003 anime preview guide! This is not new by any means. If they were linking to illegal download sites it would be a different story entirely. with the advent of a significant number of simulcasts the new Japanese season is more relevant than ever. So I have no problem with it.
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If we were to go by what he says, then every single blogger, no matter what content is there, needs to be boycotted as well(As most bloggers have posted at least one unlicensed and fansubbed series.)

My opinion: Where did our fandom originally come from? Before ADV, there was only one source: Fansubs. And I bet even before he cursed off fansubs, AnimeAlmanac watched them. Isn’t that being hypocritical?

We shouldn’t boycott ANN based on a FEW unlicensed series.>_>
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I think most of the time people don’t know how to effectively boycott so I consider boycotting pointless.

AnimeAlmanac is not the best person to boycott. I know a lot people don’t listen to him and don’t actually care what he says. It’s like the boy who cried wolf. AnimeAlmanac has cried so much no one cares. Boycotting is only effective if people will listen to you.

He’s saying to boycott the site for doing illegal things. Only people who don’t do illegal things even have the moral footing for that, and even still, what a bitch thing to do. It’s not like ANN is saying ‘lol everything we do is legal’ anyway. You could say that, especially in countries where virtual child pornography is illegal, they are doing something similar in having information on lolicon porn anime, which may promote someone to go watch it. If your going to boycot illegality, do it from the start.

And even people who don’t dl fansubs might not support your cause if they don’t think the illegality is fair. IMO worrying abut the legality of fansubs is like worrying about the legality of pot smoking – pointless. LEGALIZE!

I so thought this post was going to be about Bamboo Dong leaving Shelf Life…
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Another case of a single radical person trying to rally troops for something that makes little to no sense.
Maybe it makes more sense when you compare the popularity of ANN (quite popular) and the popularity of [whatever his blogs called] (notsomuch). Bashing something bigger DOES tend to be a good way to get some quick-fast traffic.
…
Jealousy? Perhaps.

ANN is registered in Canada. It’s owner is Canadian. It’s not a US site from the very get-go. (Not bashing you. It’s a common mistake.) As you said, many of the shows in the preview reports are available in the US & Canada legally. Plus not all of the reviewers live in North America. Some live and report from parts of the world where shows not legally available in North America are legally available where they live. Personally, I don’t think this person pushing the boycott has much of a leg to stand on. Perhaps he might have had a stronger argument in the past. But ANN and anime have become much more global and legal since its inception. Nowadays, illegality on ANN is not as strong an issue as it used to be.

“Bashing something bigger DOES tend to be a good way to get some quick-fast traffic.
…
Jealousy? Perhaps.”

Wait, so if bashing something bigger is a way to get traffic, and we’re here bashing the one who’s bashing ANN, then that means… recursion?! The little fish nipping at the big fish nipping at the even bigger fish?! Do I need to make a blog post that bashes this blog for ba–

*head hurts*

But seriously, I’m always mistrustful of bloggers who’ve disabled comments, because what they want is to be linked-to by other sites and blogs. This way they get the traffic, but none of the criticisms actually stick to them (because who’s going to go look it up down the road)? I always consider it egotistical. That’s why it’s almost a shame that we’re discussing this (even though we’re largely mocking it), because it further elevates the relevancy of one lone person starting a “one month boycott”. (If it’s a real problem, why not boycott them forever? Because then it would be a principle and not just a stunt…)

It’s just a news site…jeez. Where the heck does that logic come from? He might as well boycott TV altogether because of movie reviews or book reviews. Sheesh.
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Most of you guys weren’t here for the discussion one year ago. Some of us were.

Personally, I don’t give a damn about Scott’s anti-piracy stance or his own hypocrisy, but he did bring up some valid points. Maybe now that Zac Bertschy is doing podcasts and people are actually laughing at his jokes, we look at him differently than we did just a couple of years ago. The problem is, he’s still a fucking douchebag. The reason why I rather take Scott’s side in this matter is because the people working for ANN such as Zac Bertschy have made it clear in the past, on numerous occasions, that they are against fansubs, even though ANN’s official stance is that they don’t have any stance on the matter. Nice failsafe. Season preview guides are by no means a new thing for ANN, but tough times for the American anime industry have made people like Scott question their motives. And I’m glad they have as it has sparked an interesting thought process about website traffic, money, and piracy.

I’m a pirate myself, but I hate the idea of pirates–such as bootleg retailers–profiting financially from piracy. In the same venue, I don’t approve of AnimeNewsNetwork using pirated copies to promote their website, especially not after I’ve heard the numbers that they usually get for features like these. Just to be brief, it is not chump change.

I used to be a fansubber. The groups I was in didn’t profit from their work, any donations or ad revenue they got they put into their hobby, their bots, their website rent. Most of the time they were at a financial loss for bringing anime to the masses. Yet ANN gets to profit from fansubs they use and puts money into their pockets while they had nothing positive to say about fansubs even as far as only two years into the past. The hypocrisy is just baffling.

I acknowledge ANN having its uses, so I’m not going to boycott them, but this is a separate issue that warrants its own discussion. Right now, I can see a repeat of fansub/piracy slandering once every or 80% of all new series will be available on Crunchyroll or FUNimation’s website. I’m afraid their North-American centricism will cause them to forget about the rest of the world, just like they did when the R1 DVD industry started to shape up in early 2000s.

Watching and reviewing just one or two episodes of a new unlicensed series (many of which can now be watched legally on Crunchyroll) could only promote the series rather than cause any harm or money loss. ANN does not promote illegal downloads of entire series, especially when a series is available legally. They just want to bring awareness of new shows airing in Japan, and the unfortunately the only way they can do that is to watch a fansub or too. But their Preview Guides are just that, Preview, so they’re in no way saying that ardently downloading anime series is right.
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