1 There are at least two groups doing that, and it looks like they're both using Gonzo's own translation, to boot. Which is really super lame on their part.

2 I'm not really sure why this is surprising you - the rationale for fansubbers slowly changed from "not doing anything licensed in R1" to "Hey, we aren't all American, y'know" over the last few years. Though with Strike Witches being purchasable everywhere other than Japan, that doesn't really hold much ground either...

I kind of want to say "well, at least they are subbing it themselves", though I groan at the repetition of effort when they could be working on something less, well, English-bound, and with other groups not being beyond re-distrobuting the official releases I'd actually have to watch one of their releases to verify that it is actually their own work.

3 It's not surprising. It's disappointing, however.

4 Have crunchyroll or gonzo released any numbers on how their strike witches experiment is going?

5 Haven't heard anything. Probably we won't hear for quite a while, if we ever do.

6 Wildarmsheero watched it by torrenting a BOST file. If that is not theft then nothing is.

There was a noticeable breakdown of the social order ever since Ledford started making deals with Japanese specifically in order to cut fansubbers out (e.g. the Samurai Gun). His PR flak even went on the record with the plan. I'm not saying it was the reason, because IIRC the DVD rip bootleggers like the KAA existed previously, but people shyed them before. Not anymore.

7 I think you're inverting cause and effect there, Pete. ;p

Some people are just pirates, and that's all there is to it. I've seen enough bootlegs with my own name on it to not be shocked when it happens to someone else...

8

Fansub pirates coming up with an excuse to do what they want anyway?  I'm shocked.

And Pete, you have got to be making a joke. 

9

There was a noticeable breakdown of the social order ever since Ledford started making deals with Japanese specifically in order to cut fansubbers out (e.g. the Samurai Gun). His PR flak even went on the record with the plan. I'm not saying it was the reason, because IIRC the DVD rip bootleggers like the KAA existed previously, but people shyed them before. Not anymore.

I..umm...nani-o...huh?

I've missed a staff meeting.
What is this referring to and how does it make sense?

10 Yarr, harr, fiddle-dee-dee
Being a pirate is all you can be!
Say what you want, cause a pirate is free!
You are a pirate!

Seriously, anything that can be represented digitally will eventually be free to all, supported only by willing donations (har dee har dee har). People would rather spend their money on better (more hackable) decoders than on the content that makes those decoders anything other than overly delicate doorstops.

It's one of the reasons I stopped posting art and animation to the internet.

11 Not only will it be free to all, but if someone thinks they can scam a quick buck by downloading free content and reselling it in some form, they will. I stopped posting high-res model photos when I got tired of finding printouts ("real print from the negative"), CD-ROMs, coffee mugs, and keychains being sold on eBay. Sending takedown notices is a tedious, morale-draining chore.

Something else people would rather spend their money on is more bandwidth and blank DVD-Rs, so they can skip the transcoded videos and just download region-free ISO images.

-j

12 Tatterdemalian, J Greely, I disagree. Look at Baen. They have a pretty good business selling electronic copies of their hardcopy books. Partly because of the quality of the books, partly the pricing, and partly the complete lack of DRM. I've even heard that the sites/channel that pirate books online refuse to do so with Baen ebooks. I think Eric Flint makes some pretty compelling arguments there.

13 All it means is that the moral rot hasn't fully set in with that particular group. Time was when fansubbers too still had an ethic of sorts about who they'd steal from and who they wouldn't, but as time goes on there's a tendency to race to the bottom.

14 Eric's argument is that most people aren't theives and will pay for reasonably priced and accessable ebooks. The ones that won't, wouldn't have payed even if that was the only way to get that book, and probably aren't too much of the market. He has done experiments, and they certainly haven't hurt his sales and profits. Whether this would apply to more labor and capital intensive literary forms, like anime, I cannot say.

I am certain there are ways to get illegal copies of Baen ebooks, but I don't know why anyone reasonable would bother. Baen is so much more visible and accessable on the internet, that illegal distributers of its wares might as well not be on it.

15 I think Baen is surviving without DRM because ebook readers are still no replacement for real books. I've got a bunch of their books, free and paid for, on my Sony reader, and it works out pretty well, but even a cheap paperback has crisper type and better font selection, and is simply more enjoyable to read for long periods. Video and music, despite having more bits of content, turned out to be a lot easier to copy and use at acceptable quality.

There's also the fact that Baen sells SF. I suspect their piracy percentages would be significantly different in genres with less re-readability and reader loyalty.

-j

16

Baen actually only gives a limited (albeit generous) number of e-books away, as teasers to get readers to buy other books in the series or by the same authors.  A regular e-books retailer, Webscription, sells the others.  (Baen only sells hard copies.)  And the only reason I can imagine pirate sites would refuse to offer the same free downloads would be to save bandwidth.  They're probably annoyed by the competition.

I guess we'll see where the slashdot groupthink of "information must be free" will lead us in the future, but I do think recent events in the retail anime and manga world should give the fans some pause.  I suspect that eventually little will be available except as fansubs and scanslations of mostly poor quality.  I've noted that once someone jams out a zero day scanslation/fansub there is rarely any effort made to redo it properly when the tankoubon/DVD comes out.

But I suppose the "consumer" is always right.

17 I read computer text as easily and happily as paper, but agree that ereaders are no substitute for an actual book. On the other hand, books are no substitute for a computer full of novels.

I think Baen is not so much surviving without DRM as thriving without it. Jim, Toni, and Eric quite deliberatly avoided it, and consider it a wise decision. I don't know about the genre differences. Have you read Eric's essays?

18 I stopped paying attention to anything Eric Flint says after a lengthy argument on Usenet in which he insisted that, in an SF series that involves interstellar travel, fantastic aliens, and incredible psychic powers, most readers' willing suspension of disbelief would be demolished by someone offering a friendly cigarette to a passenger on an aircraft. Because that's just not plausible any more.

-j

19 Toren, Webscriptions is pretty much a subsidiary of Baen. Arnold worked for Jim and now works for Toni. Some pirates refuse to work with Baen novels, but I am certain that it is not all. (I remember someone who showed up on the bar wanting to resell books that he had bought off of Baen.)

I do think that anyone who would look through Baen's free library, read through the quarter of the book freely available, and then go spend the time to hunt down an illegal copy of, say, Caliphate instead of paying the $4-6 or $15 for 5, is the type who would shoplift penny candy and free food samples from the grocery. If this is the bulk of the internet's users, then we do not have to worry about theft over the internet, because we will soon not have the society to support it.

IIRC, one of Flint's essays goes through all the reasons people try to pirate books and software, and then refutes or tries to arguments against his method of selling ebooks based on the list. Included on this list is prestige. It being trivial to pirate Baen ebooks, it is not worth any status on the epirate totem pole to do so.

I agree that those events are worth thought.

20 J Greely, Was that the discussion he had with the Seawasp over the editing of the Schmitz anthologies? Flint and Seawasp ended up close friends over that.

21 Yes. It wasn't just Seawasp, though; a lot of us were in that discussion, and Flint's arguments were pretty weak. Not just about the cigarette scene, but also his defense of changing the identity of the protagonist in another story to fit it into the Telzey/Trigger series, and some other gratuitous rewrites. I was pleased to see that they at least put an ebook up of the originals eventually, without his changes.

The less said about his (shared) attempt at a sequel to Karres, the better. None of the people involved had a good grasp of the Schmitz flavor.

-j

22 J Greely,

I looked up the forward to the unedited stories just a bit ago, and I'd think the cigerette reference would date the story a bit. I don't know that it would actually effect my enjoyment one way or the other, but I'm a pretty odd duck, even in the best of cases. I have seen some arguments of Eric's that seemed pretty weak to me, although I haven't seen the usenet ones, and I think the DRM essays are strong, well put together, and worth reading. On the other hand, I liked Wizard of Karres, and am looking forward to the next book.

23

Apologizing to Steven in advance for adding to a thread that is getting a bit off the rails...

Did you know Miyazaki did the cover art for the Japanese translation of "The Witches of Karres"...?  He even thought about animating it...a match made in heaven, I thought, but alas, it was not to be.  In an odd turn of events, Miyazaki ended up giving me the original art for that cover by way of thanks for my work on Nausicaa.  As you might imagine, I have seldom been so pleased.

24 Well, yes, when someone calls your attention to it, the friendly cigarette offer can make the story look a bit dated, but the whole point we were making was that they are dated, and there are so many other things about them that shout out the era they were written in that focusing on that one out of dozens is more about the editor than the reader. The example I gave him was the casual sexual harassment in the workplace (and likely rape by the boss if she didn't put out willingly) in the opening paragraphs of that volume. That's not a Nineties story. If you make it that far, the cigarette a hundred pages later is invisible.

When we had that argument, his New York "jarring" was my Ohio "huh?", because militant ex-smokers were basically unheard of outside of large East/West coast cities. That particular change was because Flint couldn't accept it, not because general SF readers couldn't. I'm a big believer in editing (and any DVD outtake will prove its value), and I own all of the Flint-edited Schmitz volumes, but I think his attitude toward the stories was a touch too proprietary; imagine what would happen if he were to take the same approach to the Lensman novels.

As for the sequel to Karres, I read the sample in the reprint of the real thing, and I thought it got the characters, the universe, and the voice completely wrong. Maybe they cleaned it up for the final release, maybe it got better later, but why read faux Schmitz when there's so much of the real thing?

-j

25

Apologizing to Steven in advance for adding to a thread that is getting a bit off the rails...

Well, everyone seemed to be having so much fun, and I didn't want to be a bad host. (Sob, I feel so left out...)

26 If we're going to derail on the subject of Eric Flint, I've got to toss in my  story.  I pretty much gave up on Eric Flint after I triggered an epic brawl in his conference (on Baen's Bar) that started out with me pointing out what a bad idea it was for him to insult a lot of his readers ("stupid conservatives"); while simultaneously commenting in a 2nd thread that all the folks complaining that they were going to leave the fascist Amerikkka weren't doing it fast enough. 

Needless to say, he was not called onto the carpet for breaking the "no-hitting rule" in his spew of venom directed at me ("a jack-booted thug.")  When I finally cooled down enough to look at the thread again three days later, I found it had spawned a donnybrook with well over 100 messages, including challenges by John Ringo and Tom Kratman to explain his political beliefs. Which, to put it bluntly, Flint's a Trotskyite. 

No, really.  He's a  Trotskyite.  No private ownership of land, food distribution by the federal government; the whole shebang.  He's a coal-miner's boy; unions are everything good and corporations are everything evil.  I still don't know whether to be proud or appalled at starting that thread, but I know I wouldn't drink with the man. (At least four years, and yes, I'm still ticked over it, I admit.) 

Once I knew his politics, I started seeing his writing in an entirely different light.  It's always the common folks that are smart, likable, effective, and lucky.  Rich folks can be none of those, unless they exalt the common person and work for their betterment.  He wrote himself in a corner with Admiral Simpson in 1632, and then had to rehabilitate the character in the next novel.

I still buy a novel of his occasionally, but he's basically bottom-of-the-list of what I'll purchase.

27 J Greely, I shudder in horror at the thought of editing Lensmen to fit modern sensibilities.

ubu, I was aware that Flint was a Trotskyite for his religion pretty much from the get go. I tend to avoid Mutter of Demons on the bar because I don't care for what he has to say on a wide range of issues. On the other hand, I think he has some useful things to say about writing as a craft, and I've found some of the things in 1632 Tech Conference pretty interesting. Which reminds me, I probably ought to get my bar newsreader onto the computer I've actually been using this past year.

I think I remember seeing that thread. The joke would be to say, 'Of course you wouldn't drink with him, he doesn't touch alcohol.' I've never really posted to him, in part because I didn't want to trigger a flame war, or say something stupid and get myself banned.

I read most of the books that Flint writes. I think the explanation on the apparent change with Simpson was actually fairly decent. I am actually fairly anti-union myself, but if I refused to read anything by someone who I disagreed with one in major ways, well, there would be a lot fewer people I could stand to read. I am more excited about Spoor, Kratman, Weber, Ringo, Freer, Hoyt, and some others, but Flint is still a good craftsman who does decent work. In Time Spike, Flint and Kosmatka seem to have borrowed of Kratman's 'Give the left what it wants, but in a comepletly unacceptable way' trick for a certain element of the end. I am fairly indiscriminate in my taste in entertainment compared to a lot of people.

On the subject of Eric Flint and his essays on ebooks, piracy and DRM. Even if you dislike Flint's politics, he doesn't write the essays as an appeal to leftist politics. I think the essays are generally representative of Baen's corperate perspective and that of many of of its authors. I suspect that Ringo and Kratman would support the gist of the essays, even if they were to disagree with details or lines of argument. I figured that Baen's methods are likely usable to keep some types of bit products sold at high quality over the internet, and reccomending Flint's essays as a primer on those methods would be easier, take up less space, and be less disruptive then trying to explain them in full.