After yesterday’s discussion of old cartoons and Bionic Six, several people have gotten in contact with me about ways to access the cartoon, ranging from Youtube to a couple of sites whose names I’m sure will put me on some sorta watch list. When it comes to accessing media, it can be difficult to accept when something is hard to find in an ethical manner, especially when it comes to comic books that I spent YEARS trying to find a decent copy of. The existence of archives of public domain material helps a lot, but what about newer stuff that’s still unavailable? I always want to err on the side of “pay the creators as much as possible”, but not everyone shares that rule, leading to today’s pirated query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) realizes now that most of the anime and tokusatsu I watched in college were not legally obtained, asking: Would you ever be comfortable accessing media through less-ethical channels if no legal options are available?
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Yeah, if there was absolutely no other way to get it.
I wouldn’t. Having grown up during the music industry’s extreme reaction to napster, the power of copyright holders or industry groups to persecute end users for enjoying a product through “less ethical channels” is a very real concern. And I guess I might naively believe that anything I want to see that badly, other people do too–so there’s a market–so someone will try to serve that market. Unless there are messy rights issues, but even then folks seem to have gotten better at resolving those issues in recent years. Bottom line, I am a scaredy-cat.
Unfortunately I need to say yes.
My first choice is to view something in a legally responsible way.
When that is not possible, I will watch it in another fashion. That is how I managed to watch many a classic Doctor Who episode.
I subscribe to multiple legal media services and have no problem paying a few bucks for a rental. Unfortunately, some episodes are not available on DVD, Streaming or iTunes/Amazon. That is when a number of other sites become handy.
It would have to be something I knew I would enjoy immensely and had absolutely positively no other way to get it, and even then there are still some lines I wouldn’t cross. For example, I will never pirate a game or sign up for one with false info (like some foreign MMOs that require contact info from certain countries to play) even if it means I can never play it. But in the case of some foreign or long-ago TV series, if I am absolutely unable to find legal distribution or am absolutely certain there won’t be in my neck of the woods… I might be willing to try it.
For example, there are a few Japanese superhero shows that, once upon a time, were not easily accessible in the US unless you wanted either a partial adaptation or a badly dubbed version with barely any resemblance to the original. Now, we’ve got the option to find some of them in one form or another (such as legal online distribution or authorized DVD releases), but some are still hard to find without resorting to certain sites and/or services.