Anime’s eager copy klatch

When the highly rated anime fantasy-adventure “Fullmetal Alchemist” debuted in the U.S. on Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim” last November, many American viewers had already seen all 51 episodes that premiered in Japan in 2003. Some of them owned the entire series before the first DVD appeared in February (the second arrives this month).

The version they’re watching is known as a fansub, a subtitled version of the program done by amateur fans. At considerable cost -- and some legal risk -- fansubbers bring the hottest titles in Japanese animation or anime to eager audiences who can’t wait for the American versions of those shows to air here.

Japanese animation or anime has become a big business in America, accounting for $500 million in video sales and about 10 times that in licensing, rights and related merchandise sales annually. Anime enjoys widespread popularity among adolescents, teens and twentysomethings, and fansubbers constitute one of the oddest subgroups within the larger culture.

Fansubbers begin by obtaining a copy of an episode of a Japanese TV show, either by buying it or downloading it. If they don’t speak Japanese (and most don’t), they have to find someone to prepare a line-by-line English translation. Each line then must be timed and digitally added to the correct scene. Endless technical glitches can occur during the subtitling process, and specialized websites offer step-by-step advice.

Fansubbing began in the 1980s, when few anime titles were available in the U.S. Because it’s a legally gray area at best, people involved in fansubs use only their first names. Jeki, a 27-year-old fansubber, recalls, “I grew up watching ‘Robotech’ and the few other Japanese series that were on. I wanted to see more of that type of cartoon, but all Saturday morning offered was ‘The Smurfs’ and ‘Alvin & the Chipmunks.’

“When I was 12 or 13, I met a couple of people on message boards who shared my interest, and we decided we could make fansubs as a group. We bought Japanese laser discs and copied them; some of us knew Japanese and could do the translations. We really, really liked these shows and were sure other people would too. But they just weren’t out there in the marketplace, so how were people going to find them if we didn’t sub them?”

Barry, a 34-year-old software engineer and anime fan, began watching fansubs in college. “One of the clubs on campus had a collection of videotapes that you couldn’t get in stores, like ‘Kimagure Orange Road,’ ” he says.

Fansubbers initially distributed shows on videocassettes: Someone would send in a blank VHS tape and get the fansub by return mail. But the growth of the Internet and the shift to digital technology has made fansubbing easier and faster. “There are fansubbing groups in Japan that digitally capture a show as it’s being broadcast and send it to whomever’s doing the translation,” Jeki notes. “The fansubbers here have software and technology that makes it possible for them to have a good, translated copy circulating on the Net in two or three days.

“The [anime fan] conventions no longer show fansubs; distributors use them to launch their new domestic releases. Digital fansubbing means you don’t have to go to a club to watch new anime.”

The Web has become the most popular way to distribute fansubs: People log onto a site and download files of subtitled animation. The individual files are large, so to get new material users have to share the fansub programs they have. This electronic swap-meet mentality dovetails with the attitude of fansubbers, who insist they are neither pirates nor bootleggers.

“From day one to the present, the attitude of fansubbers has been we will not proceed with the subbing or the distribution of a show that has been licensed in English,” says Betty, a member of one the nation’s largest fansubbing groups. “Fansubbers hate to see people selling their work commercially, whether it’s listing copies on EBay or selling them on a website.”

“When a title comes out commercially, all the distribution sites I go to say, ‘We don’t have it anymore,’ ” agrees Barry. “I toss out any DVDs I’ve burned and delete the files. I buy the stuff I like. If I didn’t like a title, I know not to spend $20 on the DVD. There are sites where people sell things that are licensed or offer free downloads of them, just as you can get movies off the Internet, but I’ve never looked for them.”

Not surprisingly, American distributors take a dim view of fansubbing. Rod Peters, senior marketing manager at Houston-based ADV Films, the largest U.S. anime distributor, says, “Once we announce we’ve acquired the rights to distribute a program, that program cannot be subbed or distributed by anyone outside ADV. We give anyone who does a cease-and-desist order; if they continue, we turn them over to our antipiracy division for legal action.” Chad Kime, corporate planning manager at Geneon Entertainment, the distributor of the hit series “Samurai Champloo,” says bluntly, “Fansubs are illegal and a form of piracy. We cannot condone fansubbing.”

Fansubbers counter they provide distributors with valuable market research. “Like it or not -- and they certainly don’t like to admit it too loudly -- distributors know fansubs provide gold-plated marketing information,” Betty says. “If a series is popular as a fansub, they know it will sell. There have been cases where a company declined to license a title, because it had been fansubbed and ‘everyone had seen it’ and regretted the decision.”

Kime says that might have been true several years ago, but currently, “the bidding on many titles begins before the show even airs. Additionally, more and more ‘B’ titles are being ignored by the fans; many companies suspect that sales of these titles is impaired by distribution in fansub circles.”

In December, four major fansub sites received e-mail from a Tokyo law firm representing the Japanese distributor Media Factory, requesting that they stop uploading their client’s series and/or stop inducing visitors to visit websites where those series could be downloaded. Despite these countermeasures, the consensus among otoku (devotees of anime) is that fansubbing, like downloading music, has become too widespread to halt. The debate will undoubtedly continue over the next several years, as fansubbers vie to present the first versions of favorite series, and distributors on both sides of the Pacific mount counteroffensives.