It’s a simple solution, the company (Crunchyroll) that bought the other company (Funimation) buys its assets, which includes its servers. So it can rebrand the company, it can rebrand the digital copies to have the Crunchyroll splash screen rather than the Funimation one, but it should still be offering them, since Funimation’s customers are now Crunchyroll’s, and Crunchyroll has an obligation. Because they bought that. They bought the assets and liabilities.
You often hear the phrase, “if buying is not owning, then pirating is not theft,” and it usually comes across as “an eye for an eye”. But it’s really not. So let me share my understanding of the phrase. To steal (commit theft), you take something with the purpose of depriving the owner of its value. In the case of copyright, the value is its ability to be sold. Yes, you only made a copy, but by making a copy, you deprived the owner of a sale. Even if you couldn’t afford it, that doesn’t really matter to them. Now here’s the thing: if they aren’t making sales, you haven’t deprived them of anything. They can’t just replace “sale” with “rental” when you’ve spent purchase money. It’s been understood for decades that rentals are temporary and only cost a couple bucks. Ownership costs more, and guarantees you the right to play it as much as you want. They can’t say “we’re converting your purchase to a rental” very easily, so instead they want to change the lifetime of the product.
But anyway, anime has been a racket since day one. The prices to own are ridiculously high, because they want to push people to their streaming service. They never wanted you to own anime, only ever rent it. So if you paid the price to own, they need to support that, or buy you out. Take what it cost to buy the DVD or Blu-ray, adjust for inflation, and compensate the user. That’s at the very least.
All that said, they are not likely to win a DMCA exemption under the current US administration, unless the Chump is really mad at Japan. But his string pullers and handlers are smarter than that; they know an exemption for anime can extend to other animation (like Disney, and you don’t fuck with the mouse) or media in general, and Hollywood would not like that.
I’m all for media being free. I read the sidebar, nodding the whole time. I just don’t think it’ll happen. Case in point: Fallout 3. This game came out in 2008 on Windows, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. On Windows, it used the short-lived Games for Windows Live, which was Xbox Live for Windows, for both DRM, and for online play. The game did not feature online play. It did feature paid downloadable content, but the Game of the Year Edition did not, as it included all of the paid expansions. So there was no reason for GFWL to be a requirement for the game, and yet it was. GFWL shut down, and becuase the Windows version was not as popular as the one for consoles, it was never updated to remove GFWL. The only way to play the game then was to crack it so it bypassed GFWL. Nobody ever got in trouble for doing this, but it was a DMCA violation to do so.
When GOG released the game, they asked Bethesda for permission to take GFWL out. Bethesda agreed, so now you could legally play the game if you bought it again. Not ideal, but it was a legal path. They were pestered to update the one on Steam, but every time, they just said no. They didn’t come right out and say you can just crack it, but that was the understanding, that it was fine if you owned the game. But they weren’t gonna help you do it.
Eventually, they did update Fallout 3 on Steam, but they also made some changes to the game itself. I think they just made it more compatible with more recent versions of Windows. They didn’t change the actual game in any meaningful way. Aside from some bug fixes, and obviously the DLC, the only meaningful change I remember was, in the original version of the game, synths were called androids. These are robots who look human and think they’re human. They came from the Boston area, from an organisation called the Institute. This would be a major part of Fallout 4, but until that game came out, it was just lore. Well, as they were developing Fallout 4, when they settled on the name “synth,” they updated Fallout 3 to reflect it — this is when eagle-eyed (or should I say, hawk-eyed, referring to my handle) realised what Fallout 4 would be about. Because otherwise, why change the word? But that was well before the GFWL thing. When GFWL went down, Bethesda considered Fallout 3 to be finished and would not release updates to it for more than 10 years, maybe closer to 15. Fallout fans can tell you it is very recent that Fallout 3 got updated, but I don’t recall exactly when. I wanna say it was around the time Starfield came out, and that was September 2023.
So, an American company made their game effectively illegal to play, and no one challenged the DMCA over it. Maybe they should have. Most of us just ignored it. I don’t think it was really enforceable outside the US? But I’m not really sure. Guess it depends on your country’s relationship to the US. But it’s also beside the point.
