Animanga in the News: 1/26/11

Here you will find a run down of today's anime and manga news! If anything sent waves through the anime and manga world today, you'll find it in this post! By the way, I'm saladesu, one of the translator-moderators of MH, and I'll be posting a post like this every day (as much as possible, anyway). Look forward to them ;)

If you would like to help in finding and translating news of this nature, please contact saladesu via PM ^^ Feel free to PM me any interesting bits of anime or manga news you find floating around the internet, too.



ONE PIECE is an anime that is garnering not only nationwide popularity, but all over the world too. Funimation, the North American anime distribution company, has sued 1,337 users who downloaded and shared the ONE PIECE anime via BitTorrent for copyright infringement. The episode in question is #481 "Rescue Ace! The Final Order of Whitebeard!", which had been aired on Fuji TV in Japan on the 26th of December. Funimation had done a simulcast on the same day, at the same time. A summary of the lawsuit may be found here.

Funimation alleged on the 24th that these users had infringed on copyright. They said that from the 9th of January to the 12th of the same, torrent files of the "ONE PIECE" episode were available on three TOrrent sites, and the names of the 1,337 defendants and others who participated in this infringement of copyright would be revealed in the course of the suit.

Funimation is asking that the defendants stop legally distributing anime, and delete any and all media they had downloaded illegally from their PCs, hard disks and other storage devices. Naturally, they will also be asking for compensation for damages and the costs of the lawsuit.

Earlier, Funimation was forced by the Fractale Production Committee to stop its simulcast of the TV anime "Fractale", allegedly due to continued illegal distribution of the anime. Their move this time with the lawsuit has been labeled as having a promotion aspect to it, as the day the lawsuit was filed, the 24th, was also the day that they confirmed the return of the simulcast of "Fractale".

original source





Things are looking far from rosy for the Tokyo Anime Fair even as it welcomes its 10th anniversary. In retaliation against the "anime regulation" that has come out of the newly-amended laws in Tokyo, exhibitor after exhibitor has pulled out of participating in the fair. The number of exhibitors has decreased 40% to 153 companies, and the number of booths has decreased 20% to just 491 booths.

Now, the problem is not just the "numbers". Amongst the companies that have announced their boycott of the event are the "Comic 10 Society", a group of major companies that all own the rights to popular manga, thus calling to question the "quality" of the fair. The Society, including Kodansha, Shueisha and Shogakukan, made a joint declaration on the 10th of December, 2010, saying that they were firmly against both participating and cooperating with the fair.

Amongst the 10, Kadokawa Shoten, which owns the rights to popular anime "Lucky☆Star" and "Suzumiya Haruhi", along with 9 other companies in the anime industry, have formed an executive committee and will hold an event in Chiba with the message "Anime Contents Expo" on their banners, on the same day as the Fair is held in Tokyo. With the coinciding dates, there can be no mistaking their intentions. Some members of the 10 Society are not planning to participate in the expo. 132,000 people had attended the Fair in 2010, with 140,000 expected in 2011, but there has been no official downward revision of those numbers as yet.

The question now is which event anime fans will choose to attend, and the answer would lie largely in which anime characters one will be able to see at each event. Even now, nothing is for sure as there are some companies that had declared they were boycotting the fair, that are still listed on the fair's official website. On the internet, one will be able to find various edited images of the fair's posters, with certain characters among the 70 depicted crossed out or blackened. There has yet to be a general consensus as to which characters won't be at the fair, thus there are some edited images with nearly half the characters blacked out, and others with just about a third crossed out.

The Tokyo Anime Fair executive committee is in the process of printing new posters now. According to the PR correspondent of the committee, this reprinting of posters is nothing new and is done every year. However, due to the irregularity this year of having companies boycotting the event, the reprinting of posters is taking longer than it had in previous years.

As for the question about just which companies are going to be at the Fair, there is a list slated to be published on the Fair's official website in early February. Governor Ishihara said of the boycott, "You don't need to come this year. You'll just come back next year with tears in your eyes."

original source





Weekly Comic Rush will be moving completely from print to digital from their next issue, the April issue. Readers will be able to read the digital magazine on their computers (Windows 98 and up, Mac OS X) or smart phones (iPhone/iPad/iPod touch/Android). They will also switch their release days to the 1st of every month, and each issue will cost ¥450. The first digital issue, the April issue, will be released on March 1.

original source