When Piracy Becomes Promotion

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

Henry Jenkins from the December 2006 issue

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/span> /p> p>By the late ’80s, student organizations were building extensive libraries of both legal and pirated material. The early ’90s saw the emergence of “fansubbing,” the amateur translation and subtitling of Japanese anime. Time-synchronized VHS and S-VHS systems allowed fansubbers to dub tapes while retaining accurate alignment of text and image. The high costs of the earliest machines meant that fansubbing would remain a collective effort: Clubs pooled time and resources to ensure their favorite series reached a wider viewership. As costs fell, fansubbing spread outward. Soon clubs were using the Internet to coordinate their activities, divvying up series to subtitle and tapping a broader community for would-be translators. o:p> /o:p> /p> p>Beginning in the early 1990s, large-scale anime conventions brought artists and distributors from Japan, who were astonished to see a thriving culture surrounding content they had never succeeded in marketing in the United States. They went back home eager to try to tap this interest commercially. o:p> /o:p> /p> p>The first niche companies to distribute anime on