Well, it looks like the lawyers in Singapore have managed to produce a wave of fear through the anime blogger community there. The fact is that the only reason that anime downloaders in the states have not met with the same problems is because the major anime distributors either do not pursue the matter or cannot afford to massively sue the thousands of people downloading anime subs.

Maybe the distributors here see a benefit to having anime bloggers offer free advertisements and a platform for web ads (eg adsense). All this could be seen as a double edged sword from the point of view where maximal profits are the goal. It has all been endlessly debated in the past.

I think the oddest notion I come across is the belief that anything one does on the Internet is anonymous. Trust me when I say this, if someone was so inclined to want to know what you were doing online it is not too difficult to track your activities. It requires some high level of access to get a total picture but it is possible. Most of the data transferred from your computers is not encrypted. Your ISP logs your activities, even if it isn’t required by law. Every website you visit logs your visit and grabs all the available data about you such as where you are accessing from, your IP address, time of access, length of visit, operating system, browser, etc. There are various exploits available that will allow malicious people to do things to your computer that aid in all this tracking.

The government (US) knows that this data is available. That’s why there are efforts to make this stuff available to law enforcement; by proxy, corporate lawyers. Much of it already is available when the correct process is followed to request it. The movement is to make it even easier to obtain.

There are ways to protect yourself such as Tor or content distribution systems like Freenet. Of course, there is a price to be paid and that is largely in performance. Also, these projects have wider aims and goals than avoiding being picked up for illegal downloads.

We all like to think of ourselves as different and special, but there is a unique aspect to anime bloggers and downloaders. It’s something I do not hear too much from others who engage in these activities but with different genres. Many anime fans want to keep their distributors in business. There are calls to support the distributors by buying their content.

It also helps that most US fans prefer that anime is dubbed rather than subbed.

In the end, like many things these days, we little people operate at the whim of the guys with the deep pockets. When they come calling, there really isn’t anything left to do but pack up and close shop, or we can change what we do.

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This was a quick note while I had some free time. I just dropped in on the nano front page and saw some interesting post that I wanted to comment on. Back to what I was doing….