That is dumb, it is fine if the release it a few days after. Management is horrible in Crunchyroll, fun fact though crunchyroll used to be a pirate site.

I should clarify it depends on your definition of fan. When you're making a derivative work, there's two versions. There's fan which is The person is enthusiastic about the content and then there is the intellectual property variation of it, which is someone who is doing it for non-commercial reasons under fair use(or said countries equivalent). However, once you start requiring money for said process, it removes the protections the creator has shielding it and generally changes the definition to that version.

Additionally, I agree a donation jar would be much better, but even then it's been shown that that doesn't resolve all liability because fan projects have been taken down for having a donation button even though the project itself is free, heck projects have been taken down for having advertisements on the projects website despite having nothing to do with said project

Oh, indeed.

I don't doubt it with some of the translations I've seen. I think it would be better for them to just release the main content and then release subtitles further on down the road, But I assume there's probably some sort of accessibility law that forbids them from doing that.

It just gets super annoying watching a show and either having poor quality subtitles or subtitles that blatantly spoil parts of the series.

For example, in one piece

::: spoiler Early on one piece spoiler
When you first meet Blackbeard, from memory, he doesn't say who he is. He just stands there as an old drunkard. And you're meant to expect that he's just some crazy drunk person that's interacting with the main party. You don't actually find out who he is for a good 5-10 episodes. However, if you had subtitles on, they clearly label him as Blackbeard during the first encounter, so it ruins that entire revelation.
:::
I use subtitles because I have ADHD, And as part of that, it makes it so I struggle to keep up with audio versus comprehending it and subtitles give me a short delay of being able to catch up and still be able to read the text to understand what happened. when the subtitles are broken, I end up hard focusing on that. or get lost requiring me to rewind. Super annoying.

I remember that. They actually had quite a bit of trouble when they first tried to establish as an officially licensed company because of the fact that their initial user base was sailing the seas.

I think charging money for pirated content is crossing the line. Once you do it for profit, you put a target on your back for the work's author to aim for.

Yeah pretty awful. If this stuff was around when I started reading manga in the mid 2000s who knows how many series I might've skipped out on. Even though most of these are just early access, I feel like it totally goes against one of the main purposes of fan translations, accessibility. My favorite part of translating manga is knowing I'm providing otherwise unknown series to others and helping people discover something new. Not everyone can just pick up Japanese (日本語上手！！) so helping people access their hobbies is really fulfilling and gating that behind a patron is shitty. I know the pain of being a poor kid whose parents wouldn't support their interests.

I pirate because I'm broke, so, not gonna happen...

Not just that some payments platform reject credit cards from certain countries, so some people can't pay even if they want.

To me it seems fine, especially if there's still a free version that's basically the same or it gets released after a delay. I don't think I'd pay for something like this myself, and maybe they're taking some legal risk, but if the money lets them spend time making media accessible, how is there a problem that outweighs the good?

It's only crossing the line because they expect me to pay for it.

I don't give 2 shits about what the 'owners' have to 'aim for.'

I donate but I will not subscribe

Yeah, history has repeatedly proven that piracy is largely a convenience/cost calculation. Each individual person will have a different way that they measure convenience or cost, but that’s ultimately what it boils down to. And piracy’s biggest benefit is that the financial side of the “cost” equation is low.

Maybe the cost has other factors that people consider, like time spent searching for decent sources, malware risk, potential legal issues, moral objections, etc… All of that gets lumped into the cost side of the equation, and weighted based on the individual’s unique situation. For someone like a 12 year old kid with no financial freedom, the “price” side of the cost calculation will be weighted very heavily.

Meanwhile, the convenience has its own factors too. Download speed, ease of access, quality of the media being consumed, etc… All of these factors get weighted and lumped into the “convenience” side of the equation.

It ultimately just boils down to “does the convenience outweigh the cost?” And if piracy becomes less convenient/more costly, (or legit sources become more convenient/less costly) then people will reconsider their decision.

Multi-billion company (Sony) can't afford subtitles

Wuxiaworld saga is about to restart. ‍️

Are they paying the original creators?

That's the part we have to combat. The idea that being a fan of something means any contribution you do to the fandom has to be treated as essentially unpaid workforce for the franchise. In truth, it's nothing in the fact that you are a fan, but rather the fact that the thing you are a fan of is defended by some of the vilest scume of the earth (lawyers) that is a problem.

Down with copyright law!

People also shouldn't just be able to make money off of other people's creations without limits.

IMO, ideally we would implement a system of 'open licensing' where people could freely use others IP as long as they pay a public, standardized percent of revenue based on the usage.