For many fans of Japanese animation, or anime, the gap between a show’s debut in Japan and the localized release in the United States can be a frustrating wait of several months or years.

One solution is to turn to fan-subtitled episodes of a series, which can be found and distributed over the Internet. An individual or group takes an episode, subtitles it themselves, and then distributes it over the Internet either by Internet Relay Chat or person-to-person filesharing like BitTorrent.

“Fansubbers do it for love of the art, not for any money,” said senior Brennan James, a member of the Yachting Club and facilitator of Anime Night.

Despite fansubs making no profit, the legality of this practice is questionable. The way that most anime comes to the U.S. is through a process called “licensing” in which a production company agrees to commercially subtitle, dub, and distribute a series. Once a series becomes licensed, fansubbers generally stop subtitling the show and ask that fans cease distribution of previous episodes.

“The legality of that is that if it’s licensed in America obviously you can’t share pirated copies,” James said. “As far as I’m aware, it’s still legal to own a pirated copy as long as you got it when it was unlicensed in America. You just can’t share it with other people.”

This does not change the fact that fansubbing is technically illegal. One fansubbing group in particular, ANBU, cites the 17th section of the U.S. Copyright law and the Berne Convention as the primary reasons for their zero-tolerance policy of licensed material.

“Many people try to state that fansubbing is included under ‘fair use’, however it is very specific as to what constitutes ‘fair use’ and translations are not,” ANBU said in a press release on their website. “ANBU respects the wishes and license of American companies. Fansubs in themselves are illegal, testing our luck when a work has been licensed in our country is asking for trouble.”

Another frustration for enthusiasts comes when a production company obtains the license for a show, only to edit, censor, and soften the show’s content for a younger audience. In a situation like this, some fans still prefer the fansubs because they address cultural references that the official translations do not.
“A lot of fansubbers are real scholars of Japanese culture,” James said. “They put in a lot of cultural references. There are a lot of references in Japanese anime that are difficult to understand. There are words that have double meanings, and we (as foreigners) don’t get the joke. The fansubbers will actually put the cultural references in the subtitles.”
The most notorious example of censorship is 4Kids Entertainment and the show “One Piece,” which had its comic violence and mild sexuality heavily edited so it they could market it to a younger audience. In addition, approximately 40 episodes of important character exposition and backstory ended up cut out, causing confusing plot-holes and continuity issues. Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! received similar treatment.

“They strip out anything that isn’t approved for someone over the age of 10,” James said. “While I’m not a fan of Pokemon, I still think that’s a travesty to the industry.”

In an interview with Anime News Network (ANN) in 2005, 4Kids CEO Alfred R. Kahn stated that their motivation for licensing a series is derived from financial viability in terms of marketing and merchandising, instead of prioritizing accuracy and faithfulness to the original script. Many are critical of this approach, since it has led to such extensive editing and censoring.

“It’s too expensive to do the dubbing and the acquisitions because we rewrite, we re-script, we re-score,” Kahn said. “So it’s very difficult to do that if you don’t have any other revenue streams and we have to make sure we get that.”

That business-oriented mentality turns many anime fans off from official releases, since they are interested in Japanese culture and the story, not in adapting a show for American audiences from ages seven to eleven.

Most anime that receives this treatment was never intended for younger audiences to begin with. The root of the problem is that companies like 4Kids fail to realize that animation can appeal to a wider adult audience, one that does not need to have every reference to Japanese culture replaced. Until production companies address these two crucial issues, they will continue to have difficulty dissuading anime buffs from switching away from fansubs.