When Piracy Becomes Promotion

How unauthorized copying made Japanese animation profitable in the United States.

Henry Jenkins from the December 2006 issue

(Page 2 of 5)

/o:p> /span> /p> p> span class="CRbreakgrafline">With the rise of videotape recorders, American fans could copy shows off those channels and share them with their friends. Soon they were sending American shows such as Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica to Japanese fans and American GI s in exchange for Japanese programs such as Getter Robo . These tapes toured a circuit of science fiction conventions in the late ’70s and early ’80s, often shown without translation. In a format much like a radio broadcast of an opera, someone would stand up at the beginning and tell the plot, often drawing on what he or she remembered from another recital of the plot at another screening. Japanese companies were vaguely aware of such screenings but didn’t try to stop them. They didn’t have permission from their mother companies to charge these fans or provide the material, but they wanted to see how much interest the shows attracted. o:p> /o:p>