Narutofan

[masamuneehs]

Ero, I highly question the effectiveness of any remarks expressing disdain for illegal enterprise/practices in an online forum whose heart is shadowed in dubious legality.

I, on the other hand, believe a good sense for business is essential for illegal practices. (a lack of ethics helps as well). There are alot of factors to take into consideration in any business, legal or illegal, and learning how to avoid the hazards that come with an illegal trade adds an extra element that i somewhat respect. Obviously the people who get caught have some flaw (carelessness, a certain vice, loose tongues and, most often, greed) but those that don't and are successful are either lucky or smart (at least smarter than the people they're taking advantage of)

If idiots are willing to donate to this guy's site, so be it. When they figure it out it'll be a (albeit costly) good learning experience. As for the fools that never figure it out, well, they really don't deserve the money and would probably have wasted it some other way.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending NarutoFan. Illegality aside, I despise people who make their way off of deceiving and taking advantage of others. It might be 'good business' but it's also rather sickening when your best skill is fucking others over. I consider leading them on to be a far-worse act than actually taking advantage of their stupid/naive nature.

[Ero-Fan]

Originally posted by: masamuneehs
Ero, I highly question the effectiveness of any remarks expressing disdain for illegal enterprise/practices in an online forum whose heart is shadowed in dubious legality.

I have no problem with the fact that what we are doing is technically illegal. And while it might not make much difference, we are taking advantage of a corporation that can afford to be taken advantage of. Basically, he's taking advantage of people who are ignorant. I see that as the big difference here. The way I see it, its the difference between stealing a 100 dollars from a billionaire and stealing that same amount from someone barely making ends meet. He's also shorting his country/fellow citizens money, because I doubt he pays taxes (unlike the rest of us) on the money he makes. So he's keeping money from being used to help the poor, sick, education expenses, etc. It might not seem like much, but it does make a difference.
Edit: If you or I were profiting off of something people give us for free, I would see that as morally reprehensible as well. Quite frankly, I hope he just gets caught for tax evasion and not copyright infringement, since it would keep eyes off the fansubs, but I doubt one could be found out without the other coming to light.

[kippykinkel]

i wonder if any of those premium members are pissed off because theyve been paying for fillers.
also, if animeone isnt making profit off their fansubs, is it still illegal?

[mage]

1) i'm sure they aren't since they're dumb enough to pay for something at narutofan

2) it's technically illegal but the japanese companies don't do anything about it apparantly. the companies that license it are a bit harder on fansubs, though.

[kippykinkel]

i just went to check if narutofan was still up and i got hit by some freaky german pop-ups and shit. i hope i didnt get any spyware...

anyways, i was going over some of the older posts and assertnfailure's idea of target demographics and such match me perfectly. a little more than year ago, my friends told me about naruto, bittorrent and gotwoot. i could use bittorrent, but my dl speed was slow, so i tried searching for alternatives and actually came across narutofan. the moment i found out that i had to pay to dl, i thought screw it ill just figure out bittorrent. i wasnt a person who was willing to pay to watch anime. therefore, i would not have bought anime dvds nor would i have become interested in anime at all. however, after being exposed to free fansubs, i can honestly say that i am now addicted to anime and willing to buy dvds and mangas.
narutofan caters to people who are already willing to buy anime, which steals profit from the companies. yea, im pretty much just restating everything assertn said.

[Rhanfahl]

As you may or may not know, Narutofan's recieved alot of attention from the anime community, both good and bad. Tazmo's been notorious for putting up manga releases without the consent of scanlation groups (at one point inane even put up "NARUTOFAN DOES NOT HAVE OUR CONSENT TO DISTRIBUTE" all over their releases). I've also heard that tazmo would take steps towards shutting down other similiar Naruto community sites. But this topic isn't about all that. It's about exploitation for profit.

http://www.narutofan.com/index...ent-main,2006%20budget

According to this article, Narutofan.com costs $32000 a year to function. Wow...that's insane....
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, he's even started posting the withdrawal statements from his account to show that this is accurate. What's misleading, however, is the assumption that all the overhead is compensated by donations. This is wrong. It doesn't take 15 servers to host torrents, a few OST mp3s, and the Naruto manga. It just doesn't. What 90% of these servers are likely being used for is direct downloads of anime for the Plus! members.

A plus membership is $3.50 per month at Narutofan. That's $42 a year.
How many plus members does it take to reach $32k? 762 members.

While it doesn't state anywhere how many plus members they have, it IS known that the total number of members is over 900,000.

If only 0.08% of the members are plus members, then that will be enough to offset costs.
If 1% of the members are plus members, then tazmo's making over $300k a year...a 17yr old making six figures for offering fansubs released for free by DB and AONE.

In short. Don't send a dime of your money to tazmo, whether it be donations, memberships, or otherwise.

900,000 morons...
This sounds very very familiar...didn't you post something like this before Assertn?

[Canadian]

http://www.narutofan.com/index.php/c...l%20disclaimer
(Naruto Fan's Legal Disclaimer)....................................... .................................

In the first paragraph, it is stated that they are a "non-profit" website, ran by fans.

In the second paragraph, it states that NarutoFan is as "original as possible", and that they request that nothing from the website be taken without the expressed written permission of the owners. (How ironic...)

The third paragraph continues to annoy me (going on about the same stuff as the scond paragraph).

The fifth paragraph is very poorly worded (in what is inteded to mean).

Finally, they keep on using the word "it's" (which means "it is") when they should be using "its".

I'm wondering, is this legal disclaimer valid... and completely legal in itself?

[Mizuchi]

wont members notice the huge "this fansub is free, if u payed for it then u got ripped" signs in the beginning of most episodes?

[Assertn]

900,000 morons...
This sounds very very familiar...didn't you post something like this before Assertn?

This topic was created in january

[samsonlonghair]

wont members notice the huge "this fansub is free, if u payed for it then u got ripped" signs in the beginning of most episodes?

It's just like people who pay good money for bootlegs from Hong Kong. They're paying to steal, except in this case they're paying money to steal something that's distributed for free.

Basically, they're fucking retarded. What a huge shock.

This sounds very very familiar...didn't you post something like this before Assertn?

You're trying to be ironic, right?

[mage]

The way Narutofan puts it, you aren't paying for the episodes, you're paying for the bandwidth used while downloading them.

[jing]

I think the fan subbers are also retarded. I mean they could just pause their works for 1-2 weeks and all those NFplus members would be like "hey wheres my freakin naruto"

[samsonlonghair]

Why should the fansubbers change the way they work just because Tazmo and the rest of narutofan are being dicks?

[Yukimura]

People spending money to get something they could get for free with some level of effort is nothing new, but the type of people that would pay some schmuck a monthly fee to get free stuff fast are not likely to be able to garner enough assistance from most irc users to be taught to use IRC effectively.

@jing Lol, Fansubbers halting production just for NarutoFan would hurt the thousands upon thousands of people who've never heard of NarutoFan and just want to watch Naruto. Imagine if governments forced ISP's to stop providing internet servive because of illegal file sharing.

[Assertn]

People spending money to get something they could get for free with some level of effort is nothing new, but the type of people that would pay some schmuck a monthly fee to get free stuff fast are not likely to be able to garner enough assistance from most irc users to be taught to use IRC effectively.

This has all been discussed already. One of the reasons fansubs still exist is because the overwhelming majority has no means to tools like IRC.