> Crunchyroll at least needed a team of translators to create subtitles for Naruto (and other anime circa the mid 00s). That is to say: Crunchyroll may have copyrihgt-infringed upon anime, but they added value.

Most of the content on Crunchyroll was fansubbed by various IRC and torrent groups and used without permissions of the original copyright holders or of the fansub groups and without credit to the fansubbers. So, actually, no, they didn't need a team of translators, and there's a lot of anime fans who refuse to do business with Crunchyroll because of their betrayal of the fansub community.

Its been a while since those times.

I remember Dattebayo fansubs, one of those torrent fansub groups you're talking about. I remember when they shutdown and announced support for Crunchyroll, suggesting that legitimate paid streaming was the future for anyone who actually wanted to support the anime subtitle community.

Perhaps I wasn't remembering the full politics of mid 00s subtitle culture... its been a very long time since then. But for Dattebayo at least, they were quite clear on throwing their support behind Crunchyroll, to the point where it was rumored that Dattebayo was probably working with Crunchyroll. (Though I'm not sure if that was ever confirmed)

With hundreds of thousands of torrent hits per week, Dattebayo fansubs probably was one of the largest torrent fansubbers of that time. I tried to search for a history of those groups, but alas, it seems lost to time. I just got my personal memories to guide me.

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You're right in that those early fansubber / torrent / IRC groups were all separate groups with different politics. But from my perspective, the big groups (ie: Dattebayo) were definitely all in on supporting Crunchyroll.

I think your retrospective is very Dattebayo centric and distorted.

Most big fansubbing groups hated CR back in the days when CR started, since CR took their fansunbs to fuel their business.

Once CR started to make/pay for their own translations (also hiring translators from some groups in the background) the situation got better, since then a clear, legal path was visible for the community.

I don't know anything about any of these groups (I do like anime), but they had to know from the beginning that voluntary subtitling would never make any money. Even if copyright law were intended to help regular people rather than giant corporations, their work was entirely based on material they had questionable "right" to use in the first place. They scratched their own itch, and later CR had an itch too. It could be that Dattebayo always had a more complete understanding of the situation than other fansub groups had.

> but they had to know from the beginning that voluntary subtitling would never make any money.

Exactly zero of the fansubbing groups ever did it to make money. For most people, they were in it for the community, which included things like the prestige of having your name associated with a popular/successful project. The reason the fansub community was upset at CrunchyRoll was because not only did they take the content, they edited it to remove the intros and other forms of attribution to the original fansubbers.

If they had left in attribution, nobody would have cared, and CrunchyRoll would have been treated like any number of other torrent to streaming sites that existed.

Thanks, that makes sense.

> Most big fansubbing groups hated CR back in the days when CR started, since CR took their fansunbs to fuel their business.

I mean, Dattebayo definitely criticized CR at first. But by the time Dattebayo closed shop, they were highly supportive of CR. That's why its important to remember the names of these groups. Do you remember the large-fansub group and/or which anime you're talking about?

Its hard for me to think of a bigger group than Dattebayo back then. Dattebayo covered Naruto and Bleach subs, as well as a bunch of lesser known anime.

Deezer (former blogmusik) started with pirated content too, before making a deal with copyright holder.

During the illegal content days, Crunchyroll wasn't subbing the videos. Those were uploaded by dedicated fansub teams who did the actual work and CR was just another anime tube site.

> I'm not sure how Youtube or Pornhub adds value to the content.

By making it available. This is value added too.

I’m not saying it’s a direct comparison, just that bootstrapping off of content theft is pretty par for the course for the internet, be it individual creators or entire websites. I also don’t see it as a good thing, but at least with anime fansubbers it is kind of a begrudgingly accepted reality that this kind of activity helps create the market that allows the legitimate player to exist.