from i_have_no_enemies@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 28 Oct 2024 17:34
https://lemmy.world/post/21375186
Crunchyroll has faced backlash after voice actor David Wald revealed the company has been illegally opening and distributing his fan mail for the past five years, violating U.S. federal law regarding obstruction of correspondence. This revelation sparked widespread outrage, highlighting Crunchyroll’s questionable practices, including its monopoly over anime distribution in the West following its acquisition by Sony. Critics argue that Crunchyroll has become complacent, exemplified by the failure of its original content and a significant price increase for subscriptions. Furthermore, Wald’s situation underscores broader issues within the company, such as alleged discrimination against voice actors and a toxic work environment. Crunchyroll’s response has been inadequate, stating they are investigating the matter but failing to acknowledge their responsibility. This incident adds to the growing list of grievances against Crunchyroll, raising concerns about the treatment of voice actors and the future of anime distribution.
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script: Well, guys, it turns out that Crunchyroll has committed a federal crime, and it’s not something that they’ve done in just one instance. It’s something that they’ve been doing for the last 5 years. We only found out about it very recently, though, on October 25th, when David Wald, a voice actor, tweeted that if he’s been sent anything in the last 5 years in terms of fan art, fan letters, anything, then he has not received it. Because apparently, Crunchyroll has been stealing all of it. This is in direct violation of U.S. federal law, or more specifically, the U.S. Code 1702: Obstruction of Correspondence.
This has gone absolutely viral; everyone is talking about it if they’re in the anime sphere in the West. I feel like it’s not only the perfect opportunity to raise more awareness on this disgusting behavior, but to also sit down with you and show you why Crunchyroll has been a terrible company for years now, and that this only adds more to their shady, unpleasant history. Let’s talk about it.
So, Crunchyroll, as it stands, is the biggest anime distributor and streamer in the West. So if you’re outside of Asia, this is most likely the service that you’re using for anime, unless you’re a pirate. Some people, and even publications like the South China Morning Post, credit Crunchyroll for turning Japanese anime mainstream in the West. It’s a very impressive company with its size in non-Asian countries and its catalog, but it wasn’t always this anime licensing sweetheart. In fact, at some point, Japanese license holders wanted to take the website down.
You see, the website was founded in 2006, and back then it was a pirating website. Not a single thing on this page was legal. But it wasn’t just about anime; it was about anything, whether it be Asian drama, things related to video games. It was like YouTube, but for pirates, where anything could be uploaded. There were no limits, except maybe adult videos. This is the exact website you would have seen in 2006. Bleach’s 108th episode had just come out, and Naruto’s 24th episode had just come out as well. It’s a crazy time capsule.
In 2008, they somehow convinced a venture capital firm by the name of Venrock, based out of Palo Alto, California, to invest $4 million into them. After this, they sought to become legal—a legitimate space to share anime content. On January 8th, 2009, they signed a deal with TV Tokyo to host episodes of Naruto: Shippuden. Obviously, you can see how big of a deal that is, and immediately started to delete all the illegitimate content on its website that they didn’t hold rights to. They then continued to get more and more anime licensed from Japan for their Western audience, and you know what? They had a talent; they knew how to choose the animes that they licensed and then translated, because of course there’s a lot of anime that gets made every single season.
This is what made them different. No one could really compete that much with them because anime wasn’t really seen as a big deal until very recently. This is when Sony decided to create FUNimation, a direct competitor of Crunchyroll, back in 2017. Now, of course, seeing that it’s Sony, they had one hell of a lineup of popular anime, but they didn’t really know how to pick more underrated ones that the Western audience would enjoy—at least not as well as Crunchyroll did. But honestly, who cares? You have an industry, and you have multiple competitors all trying to do their own thing; that’s very healthy.
But unfortunately, that didn’t last too long. In August 2020, there were reports coming out that Sony actually wanted to buy Crunchyroll. Things were advancing; they had offered $1.1 billion to buy it. But on March 24, 2021, as things were coming to a close, the United States Department of Justice extended its review of this because they thought that maybe, just maybe, this could become a monopoly of anime outside of East Asia. Somehow, okay, some way, I don’t know who got bribed, who got threatened, but it got approved, and in August 2021, the deal was finalized. It was one of the biggest mistakes in the anime industry because this effectively meant that Sony had become the major monopoly when it comes to anime content outside of Asia.
Seeing that Sony owned so many anime streaming websites, including Wakanim, which was in France, they decided to merge everything into Crunchyroll, really solidifying the idea that they’re now a monopoly. One of the main reasons why people hate Crunchyrolland of course Sony—is due to this monopoly. I mean, look at this email that was sent to existing FUNimation customers when the merger happened. The first few paragraphs are reassuring you that, hey, don’t worry, your account info isn’t going to change—your watch history, all your preferences, everything is staying. But then you read the final paragraph, and it says this: “As p
I don’t have much to add; I don’t watch a lot of anime and when I do it tends to be
pirateddownloaded. However,I looked it up and damn. Yeah. I don’t even need to watch an episode, the art style has the “we’re trying to pander as hard as we can” look to it. I dunno if it’s just that it looks like Steven Universe (which I’ve heard is a good show about inclusivity, albeit with a shitty fandom) or something else; but something about it screams “look at how gay and diverse we are! Give us money!”
Crunchyroll has a monopoly on Anime? Shit, someone better tell Nyaa.
I always downvote videos on the technology community, because in my opinion they don’t contribute to the quality here.
But for hating on the shithole called Crunchyroll, this post deserve 1000 upvotes.
Plus, OP delivered a text version.
I am phenomenally excited about that. I hope it becomes a universal thing.
Ah yes, technology videos are really bad. Especially that Technology Connections guy, he’s the absolute worst.
And don’t even get me started on technology video reviews, tutorials, guides, educational materials and tech news. I only consume technology information in newspaper form. This new video thing just won’t catch on.
What’s wrong with technology connections? He makes easily digestible if not a bit snarky videos on classic and popular tech. It’s not really appropriate for this community though so I can see why you wouldn’t care for it being posted here
I think I missed a bit of sarcasm here…
Yeah I think it was clear there was sarcasm when they concluded on newspaper being the best form to get tech news lol
I thought it was because YouTube had become unwatchable
People have been saying it’s unwatchable for years and I can barely see the difference
The /s was delivered by the preference for newspapers. That was the giveaway in case you weren't catching on earlier.
I heard video tutorials are just a product of ‘big tube’.
As respectfully as possible: huh?
We’re on a link aggregation site, for posting links to things off-site and discuss them in relevant communities
If something is a video or article it makes no difference on its quality or relevance to the community at hand, no?
Videos demand more of the user. They demand audio access. It’s not accessible for casual browsing.
Firefox picture in picture say, “huh?”
If only there were some save for later button so you could come back later or something
Yeah, figured people would downvote me for pointing out that was a garbage response
Videos don’t degrade the quality of s link aggregator, you’re not required to immediately participate the moment you see it
In your opinion, maybe
Ok, that’s your own bad habit, guess you don’t need to participate since you won’t watch em
Tell that to broadcast news. The information provided in videos like this is basically never something original if it’s not entertainment, so you absolutely can find the information elsewhere
Still have yet to see any arguments as to how relevant content on a relevant link aggregator is in any way bad to people who don’t have a weird hate boner for specific media types, because there isn’t one 😉
I’m with you. I want to read stuff not have my time wasted by some 20 min video that could have been a 30 sec video.
Edit: I got curious. It’s a 15 min video.
They're trying to get outcompeted by nyaa. I refuse to pay money for that shit show of a streaming service
Is there a better service now that they also bought funimation?
Yes, it’s called qbittorrent
Thats not a service, thats effort and time
not anymore lol, not these days. and regardless, id rather pay some effort and time to have access to literally everything i could need, rather than paying out of my paycheck for a service where i dont get to keep what I want if the service goes down or if they decide they just dont wanna carry the show that im watching anymore. if they have it in the first place. (but hey, you could always pay for multiple subscription services so you get to watch most of what you want to. just not keep, that’s not your choice lol)
Yeah, setting up qBittorrent plus an RSS feed and VPN takes very little time and effort. Not much harder than signing up for a subscription service. Then maintaining it is as simple as updating your RSS feed with new anime you want to watch at the start of the season or when you find something you’d like to see.
Plex can be a bit of pain to setup to properly scrape anime, but there are some good guides out there. Jellyfin is easier, but setting it up for remote access is more difficult.
All in all, it’s a bit more up front effort for an overall better experience than having to juggle several monthly subscriptions every anime season just to watch everything you want to watch.
If you want to support the creators, buy the blu-rays when they come out.
Some people (like me) are lazy and don’t wlreally want to do it if it takes more than 5 minutes. I doubt I could even download a VPN program in that time lmao
Then pay for a streaming service or buy Blu-rays. You’re paying either way, the methods above are just paying with your time
I’ve tried a few different services, aside from hidive the rest had a fairly poor experience.
So give hidive a shot if you’re interested in a smooth experience.
Learn to torrent and use nyaa.
Like some Russian book pirates (Litres) becoming honest businessmen, with that splitting the community and some libraries, like Aldebaran and Librusec, going bad too. I liked old Aldebaran, it had very convenient search.
That drama is also why FB2 format exists and FB3 does not, it was in the works. And also why e-readers like FBReader and CoolReader have kinda stagnated.
So is it -just- committed a federal crime or have been doing so for years
Had been. But we’re in a post-accountability era for corporations so most likely nothing will happen.
And that era started in the 1910s.
That era started in the 1700’s Adam Smith ranted about a lack of accountability in corporations.
…wait…that username…are you…?
Uhh, nobody famous?
As far as I remember they started as a pirating site and only later started to acquire more and more streaming licenses. By all means they shouldn’t even be in business today.
Weren’t they founded on doing crime? AFAIR they were a piracy site.
You can take the company out of the pirate ship, but you can’t take the pirate ship out of the company
Another reminder that we need to keep Crunchyroll from operating in SEA market.
We enjoy our anime being available on several platform at the same time. Whether it was on Netflix, Bilibili, Muse YouTube, or regional smaller platform.
Ngl seeing nasi goreng threw me for a loop
TIL there’s Malaysian Lemmy instance called “monyet” nice name
Why do folks hate crunchyroll here so much? I’ve been torrenting anime before like everyone else, but a couple years gap later I have found it more convenient to pay $9/mo or whatever and watch shows interchangeably on TV, PC, tablet and phone. I get it, I could do this using self-hosting with various tools, but all those have an upfront cost for a media server and time invested in figuring out how I can make it all work seamlessly on a 2017 LG TV, an iPhone, Linux and a shitty Samsung tablet, plus potentially subscription fee for seed box and/or VPN as well. Whereas crunchyroll just works and if I get tired of anime again, I’ll just cancel the service.
The only thing I don’t like about crunchyroll is the lack of dubbed kids shows.
Entire Lemmy is like how r/piracy was on Reddit.
.
Back when I used it, Cruncyroll had terrible uptime and a much more limited list of shows. If they had reliable uptime, I might have actually subscribed. But not for something only up 3/4 weekends.
I stopped using it when they randomly put some shows I watching behind a paywall. I was fine with the ads, that I uhhh never saw for some reason, but once they started doing “pay to watch whole shows” I was out.
Beacuse crunchyroll consistently fuck ups. Its actually impresive. The god awful change to their site design that removed the ability to comment on videos and made it very netflix like ( which to be fair is quite good on tv , but horrible on pc ). The apparently pretty bad treatment of voice actors. Pretty bad originals apparently ( actually i only watched part of the aztec one and i dont remember why i stopped but the reviews generaly werent favorable for any of them ) . And to top it all you all in america have it good. In europe there is still heavy region locking and crunchyroll decided to block acces from all free vpns beacuse f* you ( they really could just pretend they dont exists but no ).
There’s another post above that explains why. Basically it’s a monopoly on anime streaming, and they’ve done a popular voice actor dirty by intercepting his mail, which opening someone else’s mail without permission is a federal crime, especially since they legit stole what was in the packages.
Then there’s the whole thing where Sony merged Crunchyroll and FUNimation and other services, eliminating the “buy once forever” digital streaming licenses on the other services.
“If buying isn’t owning…” and so on.
It will never cease to amaze me how people don’t understand the law. No opening that mail was not a federal crime, if it’s addressed to the business building than it is considered property of the business even if it has a specific person’s name on it. They are fully within their right to open the letter, is it a dick move and are they assholes? Yes, is it a federal crime? Absolutely not
I’d be curious to see a citation because everything I can find suggests it’s still obstruction of correspondence and a federal offense as they were not the intended recipient
The best citation I can give you at the moment is to have you ask your local Post office. I have before with mine and you can find many anecdotes of other people talking to their own post office and the answer you will generally get from the post office is that they deliver to an address and the owner of that address has the right to receive mail so when mailing to a business the business has the right to receive that mail even if it is somebody else’s name on the mail.
Technically it does violate a couple common laws depending on the situation. You can find an explanation at shrm.org/…/can-employers-open-employee-mail-sent-…
Use reading mode in Firefox to bypass the paywall
Has anything good EVER come from big company acquisitions AT ALL?
Geocities -> acquired by Yahoo -> crap -> death
Youtube -> acquired by Google -> ad crap
Blogger -> acquired by Google -> crap
Macromedia -> acquired by Adobe -> Monopoly crap
Washington Post -> acquired by Bezos -> political crap
MySQL -> Acquired by Oracle -> copyright crap
Github -> acquired by Microsoft -> crap
Reddit -> acquired by Conde Nast -> political crap
Twitter -> acquired by Musk -> utter crap
Every single time I see a cool startup get bought by a big player, all I can see is the service going to shit.
Well yes. That’s the point. Cut costs (slash staff, quality, etc) then make as much money as you can as fast as you can off the goodwill and fan loyalty built up by the original product/service.
Vulture Capital doing what it does. Make everything shittier AND more expensive.
MySpace -> acquired by News Corporation -> insta death
Also, Twitter was always crap.
So true cancel culture,drama,toxicity,etc
Blogger is no longer supported and is suffering greatly people are leaving it in droves. You might as well call it dead
I was just thinking today that any time i hear about a new company ill ask “are they publicly traded or planning to be?” I feel like thatll save a lot of time
Just went down the rabbit-hole of the acquisition of MySQL as I was bored. What a fascinating story.
Dude who originally made it in 1995, Michael Widenius, named it after his daughter My, hence MySQL. He sold it to Sun for $1 billion in 2008. He then turned around, forked the software, and produced MariaDB (I always wondered why it was named that) starting a new organization around it in 2009. It’s functionally nearly identical, often able to be used as a drop in replacement, assuming you aren’t using new features developed after the fork. Last month, he sold it again, the same fucking base software, to some private equity firm (yay…). What a guy.
Unfortunately, he’s run out of daughters to name software after and already used his son’s name for something else, so we might be at the end of open-source, community-driven DB solutions from Michael. To be fair, relying on any projects from him to be free and open indefinitely is apparently not a good idea anyway.
Roster Teeth and Wizards of the Coast. Those turned out just cycling great.
Roster Teeth was in charge of their own demise.
Holden being acquired by General Motors was okay for a while. Then it died, because they couldn’t be stuffed with the Australian market, or the local car industry at the time (and in doing so, likely kicked off its demise).
Crunchyroll’s (then Funimation) acquisition of Animelab is what led me to stop paying to stream anime.
Lower quality videos. Harder to navigate. Distracting watermarks on the side of the screen. Blocking VPNs. Ads even though you already pay them.
I hate that there is so little effort put into preventing monopolies from buying out the competition
Idk if it’s appropriate to mention this:
Opera --> acquired by kunlun --> marketing lies and became a trash browser
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/420a1ead-4b29-4574-86a6-89f928980505.jpeg">
Is Crunchyroll actually beholden to US law if they are a Japanese owned company?
Here in Australia the moment someone in the US cries foul it is waved away because simply not applicable to the laws of this country regardless what US federal law is broken, the same way all these other international companies wave away breaches of Australian law 🤷🏼♀️
I guess it would come down to the employment contract and if he was employed by a Japanese company or a US owned one?
Not sure which is why I ask.
If an Australian company has a shop or office in the US, what happens in that shop is beholden to US law. If a Japanese owned company commits US crimes while in the US, they are committing crimes.
Ah yeah fair enough that makes sense. Cheers!
So happy I didn’t buy a crunchyroll subscription