as i'm sure all and sundry know, napster has essentially lost what they term their 'legal battle to stay alive'. this has triggered a wave of coverage from the fact-oriented media, and a wave of rhetoric from the opinion-oriented media.

let no one deny us our proper place among the latter.

historically, the anime community has been very friendly to mp3s, far more so than the mainstream music community. in a time when most mp3 sites cross-linked with warez sites, and many considered the very codec illegal, the anipike openly included an 'mpeg audio' section, with links to hundreds of pages featuring mp3s from popular series.

the reasons for this are obvious.

note that the anime community in the u.s. depends largely on fan-subtitled (fansubbed) tapes. legally speaking, fansubbing is illegal duplication of copyrighted work, even though to profit from it is socially unthinkable. However, anime studios and distributors tend to ignore fansubbing, accepting that it is not worthwhile to police, especially in light of the larger potential audience it creates.

The situation is roughly similar with mp3s. japanese cds, as you all in readerland probably know, are hard to find in the u.s. and (on average) four times the cost of american cds. mp3s have made japanese music available to a global audience, as u.s. music has been for decades.

otaku culture is closely tied to, even dependent on, the internet. peer-to-peer file sharing is something we've understood all our lives, understood from irc and dyndns, from hotline. . . from rooms filled with vcrs at conventions. fansubbers have already embraced this medium, posting files at a million free sites and hundreds of private hosts.

napster was never actually a community. at best, it brought members of a community together. it allowed me to talk with people from around the world, but almost universally, they were members of this same anime community that i know, tied into the same network. napster was not important, merely easy. if it goes, we will mourn and move on.

and what of for-pay, proprietary digital formats? in the end, it depends on the format, the recipient, and the amount. as an otaku, i would gladly pay royalties to the artist/studio, reluctantly pay the distributor, and refuse to pay some shadowy consortium. i would refuse to pay for packaging (since there is none) or promotion (since none reaches me). it would have to be something i could listen to under any operating system, on any modern architecture.

the community doesn't regard mp3s as piracy. we've used them since the format was invented, and it hasn't hurt the (almost nonexistent) japanese-import cd market at all. this is a nonissue. worry about something important.

wherever you go, we are all connected.

—chris