Now, I am someone who is a big fan of things like anime and manga, and naturally the issue regarding them is finding a translation that I can understand. Nowadays, many companies exist solely to translate and distribute the media. However, for a large consumer such as myself, I would say they do not license and bring over enough. This essentially forces me to rely on fan translations, which at essence, is pirating: taking a book, translating it, and distributing it for free around the internet. At heart, pirating robs the possible income for a company and creator. However, also DUE to it, a wider audience is reached, thereby creating a GREATER possible income.
Despite being a clear violation of IP rights, online distributors are more or less left alone to their own devices while consumers blissfully increase their digital collection. This leaves me to wonder if pirating, while still giving credit (but not profit) to the authors, can actually serve as a functional, international advertisement method.
I like the thought of international advertisement through piracy. It is definitely true that piracy spreads others work to people and places that would be nearly impossible without breaking a few laws. I guess the argument authors would make against that is whos decision is that to make? Yea they may gain more fans through illegal piracy but some authors may be more interested in making a profit than gaining a wide fan base.
I agree that piracy isn’t really morally wrong if fans simply don’t have a legal option. However, I also believe that piracy is not a good solution and is only ok because there aren’t any better ones. Better solutions that are legal need to be used and I believe it will end up going the way that music has gone. By this I mean programs such as Spotify that allow for the free legal listening and sharing of music while still compensating artists. As it becomes more prominent programs such as this will spread to other types of media and solve the problem expressed above.