On the morals of fandubs, scanlations, and copyright: A response to the use of copyrighted materials
This began as a response to a concern about using small samples from copyrighted works for a weekly "Japanese←→English translation challenge" event we are trying to start over at japanese. I started replying to the concern with my own opinion on the matter, and then after I was writing for several hours I realized what a huge tangent I had gone off on.
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O.o You'd be smuggling bringing your own possessions to the island? Are you saying that if you are a citizen of Barbados, and you go on a trip, and come back with things you bought in the US, you have to pay money to bring them in?? Is it different depending on what country you're bringing things from, or just depending on the item? Because when you go to another country from the US you can bring in anything that isn't illegal, that's for your personal possession, and you don't have to pay a single tax or fee, as long as the total value of the items is under $800. Most of the manga collection I have, I brought back with me from Japan (well, actually, I sent most of it in a box from Japan, but same diff--I only had to pay shipping, not import, because it's personal items. Although if Japan didn't have sea mail, like the US doesn't, I probably would have found cost restrictive again. As it was, I only had to pay about $100 to send home about 20kg worth of manga, in the form of tankōbon and 3 months of Weekly Shōnen Jump. Sure it took several months to get it, but hey...if floating it home in a very large barrel works...)
Distribution systems really are fail, and I hate how businesses seem to regard country borders as limiters, when really, there are no borders on media anymore, except the ones that short-sighted people put there. Of course, this is not just a problem of the choices businesses make, because countries set up rules and regulations that are restrictive as well, especially for physical distribution.
I'm not interested in a world government or anything like that (I think that would be an exercise in madness, actually), but when you look at it from the perspective of the internet, the international economy is too slow and too fail on one too many levels. Even in rural El Salvador, a freaking third-world country, I was able to get on the internet and access a world of information. (Check e-mail, check facebook, read some updates on fanfiction.net...whatever!)
And yet print media is almost non-existent in that same location. I bet there are some people there who would also like very much to have some copies of a manga or two, because they know how awesome it is from the internet. The stupidity of a a business having a willing buyer that they can't even distribute to or don't have a way to distribute or don't find "worth it" to distribute to for whatever reason is teeth-grind worthy.
So, I'm not yet impressed by the supposed "international" nature of the world economy. It won't be international until we have an unrestricted flow of information across country borders--legally. As of now, unrestricted flow is not happening, except with technically illegal web sites (ie, the "black market").
By being too slow and hulking to keep ahead of the rapid changes in the Information Age, distributors, and by extension, creators, are loosing out.
It's really unfortunate. :(
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