With the Fall 2025 anime season, Crunchyroll demonstrates zero respect for anime as a medium as the presentation quality of its subtitles reach an all-time low.
It’s one more consequence of the current copyright regime being self-servingly catered to business owners.
Copyright was invented by Brits and spread worldwide by Americans; if it didn’t cater to business owners they wouldn’t have done it.
I don’t have a solution to this without either (a) exposing yourself to ruin or (b) consciously killing your interest in any commercial creative medium.
If you’re really worried, streaming copyrighted content is legal in most of the world, but really the only risk involved is when torrenting (and even then only in certain cases), in which case just use a VPN*. In other words, it’s not a crime if you never get caught.
*Courts don’t magically know when you’re pirating; the bottleneck is that the IP holder has to somehow catch you up/downloading unlicenced content and know your IP address. This is impossible for normal downloading and only possible if you’re torrenting and the IP holder is seeding in order to catch IP theft, and even then a VPN obfuscates your IP address, making this a moot point.
That it’s illegal/a crime in the books to begin with is a problem. Even more so if the punishment is disproportionate to the damages an owner can claim. There’s a reason for that: the current copyright implementation is the closest thing to an infinite money glitch in real life.
Copyright was invented by Brits and spread worldwide by Americans; if it didn’t cater to business owners they wouldn’t have done it.
Or © piracy.
I have the emphasis on “current” because of exclusive licensing and the lengthening of copyright terms before lapsing to public domain.
That’s potentially exposing yourself to financial ruin (see: Nintendo)
Piracy can be pretty safe if you have the first idea what you’re doing.
If you’re really worried, streaming copyrighted content is legal in most of the world, but really the only risk involved is when torrenting (and even then only in certain cases), in which case just use a VPN*. In other words, it’s not a crime if you never get caught.
*Courts don’t magically know when you’re pirating; the bottleneck is that the IP holder has to somehow catch you up/downloading unlicenced content and know your IP address. This is impossible for normal downloading and only possible if you’re torrenting and the IP holder is seeding in order to catch IP theft, and even then a VPN obfuscates your IP address, making this a moot point.
That it’s illegal/a crime in the books to begin with is a problem. Even more so if the punishment is disproportionate to the damages an owner can claim. There’s a reason for that: the current copyright implementation is the closest thing to an infinite money glitch in real life.