Talk:Controversy Concerns/@comment-113.173.124.231-20120914011542/@comment-53539-20120914073626

This is what I was told when we raised this point to a Japanese businessman back in my Beyblade days.

Each fandom or circle of fans seperates themselves from another fandom, so the practices of one are NOT nessecary the same as another. In the beyblade fandom, there was a general rule amongst the Japanese fans that you don't steal artwork from one artist, you don't disrespect the artists, etc,etc. There are also what they call "underground fans" who keep their practices to themselves and don't mix illegal with legal. Though fans drift between the ones in the light and the underground often, he explained it was never a good idea to mention in one community that was legal aimed you were dong the illegal stuff.

And despite scanlations and things like this existing, its still taken seriously if you get caught. A few years ago, like 2007 more like, a Bobobobobobo scanlation group were caught uploading illegal scanalations. For a while all the scanlations groups were on red alert and things were kept stricker until the groups grew in confidence. Even when they Japanese business man was caughtsharing beyblade episodes, he was heavily fined so wasn't happy about it. They caught him because a western fan descided to reupload the same file onto the net and they traced it back to him because of it. He was angry because in the Japanese fandom no one would dream of doing this. He literally reduced who he notified of it to just 5 or 6 people, one of which was me, but I never downloaded any of the episodes since I had a limited dial up connection anyway and honestly... I was at this point questioning my morals. This I did until 2008 when I made up my mind its better just NOT to do illegale stuff (I admit it took me several years to decide this). :-/

I won't say its always like this in the Japanese fandom(s), but this is only what I was told happened and sadly why a conflict happened in the Japanese and English Beyblade fandom back in 2004. A 'Big event.