[Ledgem]

Originally Posted by mit7059

I don't think I'm missing the point. The fact is that it would be incredibly hard and expensive for a copyright holder in Japan to stage a lawsuit against a site like Animesuki especially since animesuki has a history of complying with all requests to remove content as has been the case with Media Factory, Funimation and Kadokawa. It would simply not make economic sense for a Japanese company to wage a expensive legal battle where they would gain nothing more than what they would with the mailing of a simple letter. This totally negates option A as TheFluff put it since because animesuki is at no real risk there is no reason to take down the torrent listings.

I don't mean to sound argumentive, but you wrote two conflicting things here. You're saying that it'd be incredibly difficult and expensive for a company to successfully sue AnimeSuki, yet you also mention that AnimeSuki is very good about complying with take-down requests. Don't you think that the former is partly a result of the latter?

Let's take that a step further. AnimeSuki already doesn't allow any series from MFI to be listed, regardless of licensing status. If all other anime studios followed in MFI's footsteps and wrote letters so threatening that AnimeSuki couldn't list those series, what then? Option A, as listed in the original post? If that's the case, then we're really just biding time and hoping that it'll never get there.

Originally Posted by mit7059

Option B though offers a number of risks
...
2. Further piss off the american anime producers which would probably lead to lawsuits draining the resources of AS, probably taking it off the net and further weakening the already weak american anime industry.

If TheFluff is to be believed (and based on little bits that I've read here and there, and what I've been exposed to as a fansubber, I have no reason to doubt what he says on this) American companies really have no love of fansubs at all, and they don't care whether a series if licensed or not. Licensing a series just gives them a legal grounds to send C&D's over. In other words, AnimeSuki can't really get into much worse standing with the companies than they already are, by their affilitation with fansubs.

Originally Posted by mit7059

The way I see it this is a case of 'if it ain't broke don't fix it'.

It's sort of like driving 5 MPH above the speed limit, is what it is. It's technically illegal, but you're probably not going to get pulled over for it, especially when there are plenty of other more obvious targets around. Yet when you're the only one on the road, or if the police officer is in a really foul mood and/or needs to meet his ticket quota, your time is up.

And that's partly TheFluff's point. He's saying that we can either drop down to "the speed limit" (remove torrents, go completely legal) or we can recognize that we're already technically breaking the law, and loosen up a bit. We don't need to go 100 MPH over the limit and flagrantly flout the law (which would be similar to what ThePirateBay did and is doing), but we can stop worrying about whether we're doing 5 MPH or 8 MPH over.

Originally Posted by mit7059

Personally I find the whole 'say no to discrimination' line to be especially stupid. It's not discrimination, AS moderators don't ban the discussion of licenced anime, they simply stop listing torrents of licensed anime, which any person with a brain and a computer could find anyway with just the smallest amount of inconvenience.

Sorry, but I disagree. I've never linked to or discussed where to get licensed anime, but I've received two infractions over this issue, and in both cases I feel that they were a little overly strict. (The first one was over telling a user how to get rid of the "Windows Genuine Advantage" checker after it went crazy on him. He never said he was using a pirated copy of Windows, so I assumed that he was a legit user who had the software go rabid on him - which happened more often than it should have. Any techy user would probably side with me in saying that such help wasn't a violation of anything and deserved some good karma, yet that post was deleted and I received an infraction. Strict.) That sort of policing gives the impression that we're terrified of being discovered for even the smallest things that might imply that we're not 100% law abiding, yet the irony is that fansubs are in violation of the DMCA, period. 5 MPH vs. 8 MPH - loosen up a little.

I actually don't care that much, but I bring up the infraction example to show what I consider to be a bit of an extreme. I'm not going to argue whether I was in the right or wrong on that one, I've clearly stated my opinion on it.

Originally Posted by mit7059

As I said before Animesuki provides us a wonderful free service, no matter what happens it's not our necks on the line, and the risk the animesuki might disappear is not worth the tiny inconvenience of typing isohunt or mininova into your browser.

Nobody is advocating for turning AnimeSuki into isohunt or mininova. I see this as more of a soul-searching exercise, trying to determine where AnimeSuki will be when it's forced to make a decision.