From :
http://digital.asiaone.com/Digital/News/Story/A1Story20070904-24099.html
Japanese, Korean anime are booming, not ailing
Tue, Sep 04, 2007
The Straits Times
I WRITE to correct the claims made by Odex director Peter Go in the
article, 'StarHub must give names of illegal anime downloaders'
(ST, Aug 14).
Quoting from the article: 'Mr Go said the South Korean anime
market, once the largest after Japan, collapsed several years ago
due to piracy problems. This prompted Japanese studios making anime
to band together to mount the crackdown here as they were worried
Singapore, although not as big a market, would end up the same
way.' And 'illegal downloads, available online since the late
1990s, have cut deeply into the profits of producers and
distributors'.
However, this is false.
According to the December 2006 issue of Reason magazine (twice
named one of the United States' 50 Best Magazines by the Chicago
Tribune): 'The global sales of Japan's animation industry reached
an astonishing $80 billion in 2004, 10 times what they were a
decade before. It has won this worldwide success in part because
Japanese media companies paid little attention to the kinds of
grassroots activities - call it piracy, unauthorised duplication
and circulation, or simply file-sharing.'
These activities, claimed by Odex to be illegal and piracy, are
widely known as 'fansubbing', or the distribution of Japanese anime
with amateur translation and subtitling by fans. They have proven
to be a free and far-reaching source of promotion by exposing
people to anime, which would have been costly and risky if done by
commercial distributors.
A great example is The Melancholy Of Suzumiya Haruhi, which shot to
worldwide popularity due to fansubs. It is reasonable to say that
fansubs have contributed to the continuous and massive growth of
the Japanese animation industry.
The Korean animation industry is also very much alive. According to
recent articles this year by PRZoom and ee-
ProductCenter, the 'South Korean animation industry is the third
largest behind the US and Japan' and 'it accounts for 30 per cent
of the total output in the global animation market'. The sheer size
of the Korean animation industry shows it is far from
collapse.
