QUOTE (sayonara solitia @ Jan 25 2012, 08:21 AM)i am so worried now ... what if youtube and all those sites get shut down ?! how the hell are we supposed to watch anime !!??
Youtube have been pulling anime since google took them over almost, especially when that max of 10 mins video limit was put on.
As for the 'how are you/(we) supposed to' question, well your not. Simply put, we're not supposed to be doing any of that.
Anime Fansubs for the most part were tollerated in the early days because 1) Noone cared about the western market. 2) It helped market it to that small western market. 3)it was so small scale it wasnt considered worth it.
Then came the US anime Co's and things started to get a bit more serious for a western market, but still wasnt a huge deal for the Japanese companies, so unlicensed stuff was again ignored.
Now, the japanese companies have realised that they can add in english subs and sell it themselves for the same prices in Japan. Let the forigners buy that, or if not they don't care. No need to worry about comtaminating the Japanese market with cheaper US releases (their big issue) nor bother running US/EU based operations (cough namco/bandi shutting down house) or bothering about licences, just add some subs and more profit. (and again, if no sale no care).
What this means is now the non-licensed stuff is no longer tollerated, and if given the chance to blanket support a large law enforcement agencies foreign investigation to kill off all downloads with a simple thumbs up, they will.
So yes, right now I'd say fansubs are in serious danger. I suspect what will happen is a new file shareing medium will be created, just like what happened before with ed2k, kazza etc, we'll see some new more secure p2p type of thing come up from somewhere, which will probably popup within a couple months of the FBI killing off most of the current mainstream methods.
Or maybe everyone will switch over to Tor and in the process we'll see people running Tor nodes all over the place. Maybe we could move FTV off of the open internet entirely and move it to Tor, Fansub.onion anyone? lol.
Edit:
Btw, I though this was quite funny, if your in the US make sure you sign it lol
Investigate Chris Dodd and the MPAA for bribery
and the
story here