The EverAnime Stink

I wish to share something personally painful.

My pride and joy.

My first Cowboy Bebop CD, is a bootleg.

Okay, the pictures:

Here's Cowboy Bebop: No Disc

Here's another view.


And here's the moneyshot.

Know why?

Ever Anime is a known bootleg producer, as refered to from this site.

And here's the EverAnime wikipedia entry.

Don't make the same mistakes I made.

Avoid EverAnime (and also SonMay) like a Taliban fighter touring the USA.

Gunslinger Girl Bootlegs in Queensbay

Gunslinger Girl, as everyone who has experience the discomfort of listening to me talk about anime knows, is my all time favourite must-watch-must-buy anime.

So before we proceed with my latest findings, please visit the wiki. Trust me, you will be referring to it in a while.

Queensbay is home to an anime shop on the same floor as the cinemas, you can't miss it.

Imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon the latest season of Gunslinger Girl (Il Teatrino, with all 13 episodes no less!) being sold for not more than RM20.00.

The Japanese television broadcast (on Tokyo MX TV) for the series, as you can read in the wiki, ended on the 31st of March, 2008.

This is an important date, because Japanese broadcasters demand a 90 day monopoly on the anime series being broadcast:

"When we're dealing with a TV series, very often Japanese TV networks...[demand] a 90-day monopoly on that product. From the day that it premieres on whatever TV network in Japan, for the next 90 days, absolutely no one is allowed to show that product anywhere else in the world,"

In essence, this explains why most legal anime you see being sold come in blocks of 3 episodes, as the 90 day limit lapses on each individual episode.

While this is a moronic distribution method, it is absolutely legal.

So unlike the bootleg 13-episodes-in-one-DVD Gunslinger Girl Il Teatrino (with a Gun X Sword logo emblazoned above it for some nefarious reason), this would be what a typical legal DVD box set from Japan would look like.

Of course, I checked this site out to view its legality, and you can read the ratings here.

Though the reviews are rather disparaging, the words "illegal", "piracy", and "bootleg" do not appear.

In conclusion, don't buy any illegal or pirated software. Okay, I know the majority of you folks out there think it's your god-given right to buy cheap VCDs and DVDs.

But the truth is, you can survive without these item, because they are being purchased with DISPOSABLE INCOME. The moral thing to do if you believe the item is overpriced is not to buy it at all. Being a software/web design company employee has made me regret many of the statements and actions I have made regarding pirated software, and I am now striving to rectify these mistakes.

What galls me isn't the prevalence of pirated products, but pirated products being passed off as the real thing... in large national book stores and video outlets. This essentially means consumers don't even have an obvious choice for legal products.

It may be a difficult decision for many, but the choice to purchase pirated products is one of those tiny judgements in life that defines you as a person. For:

Though the soul be single comprehending,
Man is but the sum of things him.

Technically Legal?

Through hours of web trawling, I have discovered a certain trade agreement known as the Berne Convention.

Apparently, this convention is an agreement that protects the intellectual works of art from theft by unscrupulous individuals. However, this is only the case if both countries are members of the Berne Convention.

Interestingly enough, Taiwan is not a signatory of the convention.

Since I have yet to finish reading the entire document, I can't come to any conclusions yet. But from what I have read, it seems the anime being sold everywhere in Malaysia as original products which are actually imports of bootlegs from Taiwan, may be technically legal because Taiwan is not a signatory to Berne.

Until then, happy reading!

Related Links:
Berne Convention pdf document

The Case of the Cheap Bleach Boxset (aka CBB)

The 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.

Other related links:

• IIPA 2007 Special Report MALAYSIA
• FAQ on Pirates
• Popular
• Legal Anime Alternatives