Anxious times in the cartoon underground

[BJ_M]

In early December, a bombshell dropped onto one of the fastest-growing file-swapping communities online, where Nikolai Nolan has made his home for the last several years.

Nolan, a 22-year-old student at the University of Michigan, is one of the leaders of Anime-Faith, one of hundreds of groups that take Japanese cartoons, translate and subtitle them in English, and release them freely on the Net.

For years this "fansubbing" community has believed that Japanese animation studios tacitly condoned their online activities, at least as long as the shows hadn't yet been released in the United States. But in early December, a studio called Media Factory began sending letters to a handful of big anime fan sites ordering them to stop distributing or linking to copies of its works online


read more here: http://news.com.com/Anxious+times+in+the+cartoon+underground/2100-1026_3-5557177.html?...=st.rc.targ_mb




.......Hard numbers are always hard to come by. But on one of the most widely used hubs for swapping, which uses the BitTorrent file-distribution technology, more than 120,000 anime cartoon episodes are downloaded a day using the site's tools alone. That amounts to more than 90 terabytes of data a day, the site's statistics show. (For comparison purposes, that's the equivalent of about 22 million MP3 songs.)

[Gurm]

That's sad. A lot of fansubbed Anime just is NOT available, for ANY amount of money, to westerners. It's sad that the companies would want to shut it down - but then again, it's possible that the companies now have all their material in the pipeline... we can only hope!