Piracy and Downloading
With the downfall of Geneon, do you think downloading fansubs has had anything to do with it?

time to flex some of my journalistic rant muscle. :) (I do this sort of thing daily to the annoyance of many:P) even if it were true, it's a sign of changing times and changing ways for "everyone" in the content delivery business to make their buck. Have I ever bought a single episode of Naruto? Hell no. Have I spent a fortune on two girls obsessed with it in merchandise? Hell yes. (oh, and Fruits Basket too) Back to Geneon...If you examine the situation carefully you realize a few fundamental things were wrong from a business standpoint that had little to do with what they were (or weren't) selling. When Dentsu aquired the division from Pioneer, it was already saddled with horrendous and well storied corporate mismanagement and buttloads of debt. It's really a matter of Dentsu overestimating their ability to leverage Geneon's existing infrastructure to drastically increase their brand marketing strength in the North American market. They were too aggressive, and the market wasn't ready. ADV's withdrawl of distribution rights was due to inability to negotiate acceptable profit margins, and this was due to Geneon's excessive overhead costs caused by the hole they had dug themselves into over the last 4 years. Other media providers in this genre have met with considerable success, by better understanding the market and making more informed decisions related to marketing and merchandising and capital expenditure. In other words, Geneon's failures are business failures, and ones largely unrelated to the whole issue of fansubs. I know at least in Harvard and American Enterprise Institute studies of the effects of mp3 downloading on the music industry, the general consensus in academia is that it's had a net positive effect on an industry that was already sliding down the path it finds itself on now. It's easy to "finger point", but when you delve deeper into such issues you find there are far more complex market forces at work than at first seems apparent.

Man, I've never heard anyone put it that way. Everyone's always hissing at the fansubbers and downloaders. And actually a lot of people think the same way when the discussion of music and downloading came out.

The deeper issue is more a philisophical one than a "moral" one, and I wrote an entire article about this last year (that got me slashdotted, and crashed my server several times....hence the quad xeon dedicated server we have now. :P ) The article is here. http://www.fastsilicon.com/opinions-editorials/the-controversy-over-content-piracy-101.html My general take on the issue is that it largely doesn't matter what you or I think about fansubs, downloading, p2p or copyright law. It's an unstoppable juggernaut of change. Any time there are fundamental changes in business models, it is the businesses themselves that have to adapt and win back their customers with different methods of doing business. I make a couple of historical arguments to back this up as well.