Thursday, March 27, 2008

The Case of the Cheap Bleach Boxset (aka CBB)

Digg my articleThe case began with a friend of mine, Tommy, showing me a 60 episode boxset of Bleach which was bought for the phenomenal price of RM 59.90.

I had no suspicions of it being illegitimate, seeing as it was bought from Popular, a well known book chain firmly rooted in Malaysia. So I let the issue go.

However, the lousy subtitling brought to mind stories of Hong Kong pirates selling bootlegs of anime as the legitimate thing.

After some time, I posed my suspicions to members of the #Japanator channel on irc.irchighway.net who subsequently answered that the products could not be legal, as bootleg versions of anime sold in their country (the USA) were still more expensive than the allegedly legal ones here.

I finally met the people manning Popular (Gurney Plaza branch) yesterday, on the 27th of March 2008.

Since I carelessly forgot to borrow a recording device of some sort, I will present at least 3 witnesses to the event if anyone should ask for one in a court of law.

I have posted my preliminary findings on the Japanator forum under the thread Too Cheap to be True, so it would be rather repetitive of me even if I rephrased them here.

Anyway, a summary of my findings up to today:
  1. Box sets being sold by anime distributors in Malaysia are crushingly cheap compared to distributors in other countries.
  2. There is at least one confirmed distributor of anime DVDs in Malaysia, Technogram (according to this site, which happens to be a blog), which is the Malaysian branch of Odex, the Singaporean company now suing Internet users who download anime from the web illegally. Since they are suing people downloading anime from the web, and haven't been sued by any Japanese company for wrongful claims of Intellectual Property, the evidence weighs heavily in Odex's favour that it is a legitimate anime distributor.
  3. If however, Animedia Entertainment is a legitimate company, I have no qualms purchasing stuff from them. This is after all, an inquiry into the legitimacy of the product, not an accusation of guilt.
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