Talk:VOCALOID Piracy/@comment-36843431-20180910060650/@comment-53539-20180912102058

I've been on the net since 1998/9 and in a number of fandoms, some forgettable and others memorable. But, in all fandoms certain things repeat themselves such as selfishness, greed, ignorance, etc. Pirating is one of those that rears its ugly head in most fandoms. So the same stories come out time and time again and the issues never end up going away. Whether your a Bieber fan, Call of Duty, Minecraft, Naruto, etc fan your respective fandoms often have to deal with this.

I will note in some cases pirating is very beneficial. Take for instance the Flint the Time Detective fandom, we can't get hold of the original Japanese versions easy. Nor the English dub either. What you end up with is relying on pirates to pull together scraps of information on a series that has little fans to begin with. But without those pirates, we would have no information at all.

Pirated stuff sticks around for decades after something has finished and even larger fanbases have benefitted from pirating. When the BBC was discovered to have not preserved much of its old series there was outcry in the UK over the shows lost to time. Therefore, the VHS tape was valuable in recovering any of these shows, though it could not save all and only went up to when the technology appeared. But, it is why certain shows among the BBC's lost list ended up being preserved better then those before it appeared.

The pirates *can* be heroes therefore and are salvations in recovering lost information when TV shows stop airing things or studios don't preserve stuff. But there is a difference between this sort of pirating that is beneficial in pulling together information, and the kind that hurts companies such as the Vocaloid case. I would never have been a pokemon fan if not for pirated Pokemon games and I've bought every one since the DS was released. But I know there are those out there who will still never buy any game for Pokemon and even managed to get pirate games onto cartridges. Its easy to think entirely that pirating is bad, but there are cases of good.

But in the modern digital age wherein everything ever aired or played can be copied... Pirating is more of a problem in regards to the last 18 years of media existence, compared to the previous eras. This is simply because of the way the internet works these days and how easy it is to access information. In contrast to a show that aired 30 years ago, the studio that made that show might not even be around anymore to earn money so the pirate doesn't hurt them at all. Nobody is left to claim lost revenue from pirates and fans can get hold of the shows information by watching it. But 40,000+ downloads of VY2, definately is a hurtful number since he is still on sale. Which is why our fandom suffers quite often from the pirating rather it being a saving grace.