I WRITE to correct the claims made by Odex director Peter Go in the article, 'StarHub must give names of illegal anime downloaders' (ST, Aug 14).
Quoting from the article: 'Mr Go said the South Korean anime market, once the largest after Japan, collapsed several years ago due to piracy problems. This prompted Japanese studios making anime to band together to mount the crackdown here as they were worried Singapore, although not as big a market, would end up the same way.' And 'illegal downloads, available online since the late 1990s, have cut deeply into the profits of producers and distributors'.
However, this is false.
According to the December 2006 issue of Reason magazine (twice named one of the United States' 50 Best Magazines by the Chicago Tribune): 'The global sales of Japan's animation industry reached an astonishing $80 billion in 2004, 10 times what they were a decade before. It has won this worldwide success in part because Japanese media companies paid little attention to the kinds of grassroots activities - call it piracy, unauthorised duplication and circulation, or simply file-sharing.'
These activities, claimed by Odex to be illegal and piracy, are widely known as 'fansubbing', or the distribution of Japanese anime with amateur translation and subtitling by fans. They have proven to be a free and far-reaching source of promotion by exposing people to anime, which would have been costly and risky if done by commercial distributors.
A great example is The Melancholy Of Suzumiya Haruhi, which shot to worldwide popularity due to fansubs. It is reasonable to say that fansubs have contributed to the continuous and massive growth of the Japanese animation industry.
The Korean animation industry is also very much alive. According to recent articles this year by PRZoom and ee-
ProductCenter, the 'South Korean animation industry is the third largest behind the US and Japan' and 'it accounts for 30 per cent of the total output in the global animation market'. The sheer size of the Korean animation industry shows it is far from collapse.
