AnimeSuki Forums

tyciol · 2019-09-26, 16:35

From homepage:

Quote:

For many years AnimeSuki tried to be a complete and convenient overview for all unlicensed English anime fansubs available through the file sharing application BitTorrent.

The advent of anime streaming services like Crunchyroll, FunimationNow, HIDIVE, Amazon Prime Video and Netflix (to name a few) has made the site all but obsolete.

The site was effectively defunct for a number of years now, so its closure was long overdue.

I imagine there were many older series not licenses by CR/FN/HD/APV/NF ...

While there are various places like Nyaa which do still have their torrent files, they are mixed in with a bunch of licensed stuff...

That's kind of inconvenient for those of us who only want to find unlicensed series, whether it be for moral reasons or simply safety (ie copyright trolls sniffing IPs using the torrents and starting legal action against them via contacting the ISPs of those not using seedboxes or proxy servers)

Do you think there might potentially be a future for tracking series which aren't licensed, however much that may have shrunk?

Those not licensed would be sort of niche ... not appealing enough for a company to license, whether due to being controversial or due to being old / unloved.

I remember I used to come here to find out about a bunch of stuff like the World Masterpiece Theatre ones from the 80s/90s for example.

It's sort of hard to find stuff like that when searching randomly on other torrent sites like Nyaa due to the flood of more popular licensed stuff.

Baka has some of it but due to their completionist policies, didn't help with making aware of only partially-subbed series. Not to mention that since they went private, it's become difficult to maintain the ratio required to get non-freeleech stuff, which is very tough on the older series that aren't 1080p (most of them)

If it is not possible to track that special niche groups, is there some way to perhaps partner / mentor the restructuring of sites like nyaa with features/categories that allow restricting searches to non-licensed things only?

SeijiSensei · 2019-09-27, 13:06

I can't speak for people like xris, but I doubt there will ever be torrent listings on this site again.

You should talk to the admins at Nyaa and see if they would add a licensed/non-licensed category to their search engine. I'd guess that would be way more work than they wish to undertake. Also most current anime fans could care less about this issue considering how many of them use sites like Kissanime. And the vast majority of viewers are interested in the most recent shows most of which are licensed.

***relentlessflame*** · 2019-09-30, 05:42

The short and simple answer to the question is that, for AnimeSuki, there isn't any foreseeable future in doing any torrent tracking or being involved with that anymore.

One of the issues with this kind of thing nowadays is that, although we make some sort of moral/ethical distinction about licensing status, it actually makes no difference to the rightsholders (there's no legal distinction), and these days most of the copyright takedown notices are automated/scripted. So you can't really treat it like the old days where you hope the industry will turn a blind eye to your site just because you abide by a sort of code of conduct; you're either "a piracy site" or "not a piracy site." If you're going to be a piracy site, you have to be prepared to deal with the related complications, but it's pretty hard to justify that amount of effort (and likely cost) for something so super niche.

Combine that with what was said above... most people don't make any distinction about licensing at all (or even know what it is these days), and even torrents themselves are mostly supplanted by streaming (both legal and illegal). So to run a torrent tracker for unlicensed, generally-older anime would be almost impossible, I think, unless some of the admins at sites currently in this field had a real passion for this niche.

It seems to me that, at this point, this has turned into more of an archivist project than anything strictly related to licensing or BitTorrent. As fansubs were the only way some of these old super-niche shows were ever made available in English, there'd be a historic value in trying to preserve all those files somehow and make them available in some form or fashion. Here too I don't think this is really a project that AnimeSuki would be involved with anymore, but I can definitely see the value of such a project.

So anyway, for AnimeSuki the chapter is fully closed on playing this role, but perhaps a new team will take on this problem and cast a new vision for how it can be solved in this day and age.

2019-09-27, 13:06	Link #2
SeijiSensei AS Oji-kun Join Date: Nov 2006 Age: 74	I can't speak for people like xris, but I doubt there will ever be torrent listings on this site again. You should talk to the admins at Nyaa and see if they would add a licensed/non-licensed category to their search engine. I'd guess that would be way more work than they wish to undertake. Also most current anime fans could care less about this issue considering how many of them use sites like Kissanime. And the vast majority of viewers are interested in the most recent shows most of which are licensed. __________________ Taking Anime Seriously - Politics by the Numbers - Sports by the Numbers - MAL List - Avatars - Images

2019-09-30, 05:42	Link #3
*relentlessflame* 　 Administrator Join Date: Dec 2003 Age: 41	The short and simple answer to the question is that, for AnimeSuki, there isn't any foreseeable future in doing any torrent tracking or being involved with that anymore. One of the issues with this kind of thing nowadays is that, although we make some sort of moral/ethical distinction about licensing status, it actually makes no difference to the rightsholders (there's no legal distinction), and these days most of the copyright takedown notices are automated/scripted. So you can't really treat it like the old days where you hope the industry will turn a blind eye to your site just because you abide by a sort of code of conduct; you're either "a piracy site" or "not a piracy site." If you're going to be a piracy site, you have to be prepared to deal with the related complications, but it's pretty hard to justify that amount of effort (and likely cost) for something so super niche. Combine that with what was said above... most people don't make any distinction about licensing at all (or even know what it is these days), and even torrents themselves are mostly supplanted by streaming (both legal and illegal). So to run a torrent tracker for unlicensed, generally-older anime would be almost impossible, I think, unless some of the admins at sites currently in this field had a real passion for this niche. It seems to me that, at this point, this has turned into more of an archivist project than anything strictly related to licensing or BitTorrent. As fansubs were the only way some of these old super-niche shows were ever made available in English, there'd be a historic value in trying to preserve all those files somehow and make them available in some form or fashion. Here too I don't think this is really a project that AnimeSuki would be involved with anymore, but I can definitely see the value of such a project. So anyway, for AnimeSuki the chapter is fully closed on playing this role, but perhaps a new team will take on this problem and cast a new vision for how it can be solved in this day and age. __________________ [...]