Thailand was famous among travelers for pirating famous movies and selling CDs/DVDs for 0.60 USD or less. The anime/manga portion of the country suffered no less, with pirated anime sites still amok. Although this has gotten better in recent years, with Thai scan groups and fansub groups actively deleting titles which had been licensed, we still see illegal circulation of some titles from time to time.
Here is the question though: why?
I’m no expert on this issue, but I used to be part of the problem and I’ll give my take on it.
Do people understand copyrights?
I’m in the Thai online writers community, and oh my gosh, there is a flood of questions and concern about legal stuff. Can I use this font? Can I use this picture? Like, some people don’t read stuff about what you’re allowed to do with content. They never knew what commercial use is, never read what they’re allowed to do with contents offered in apps like Canva or iBis Paint, etc. People would use portraits of K-pop artists as their novel cover and sell them. (And they sell pretty well too.) Basically, they use the artist’s fame without contributing anything back to the artist. This isn’t a bad problem in a more mature community, but in the young writers’ community, for the name of Mother Madoka, it’s such a plague.
Okay, sorry for going off topic. The thing is, stuff about copyrights isn’t mentioned in school. These young people are left to their own/with their peers to figure out the legal loopholes of copyright infringement. I spent my school life not having a single class mentioning copyright. Not even in Photoshop class. For most people, they know that they can’t use fake Hello Kitty products or fake Louis Vuitton bags, but that’s about it.
I know this issue is not exclusive to Thailand, but we really should start educating people, especially in the digital age.
Is horrible localization the problem here?
Recently, those in the anime and manga communities actively promote free and/or paid subscription for legal content. It is an effort by the community to make sure money falls into the right pockets. However, this is quite recent, gaining prominence only in the past 4-5 years with streaming boom in the country.
The thing is that, even some fansubs are better and more faithful to the original than the legal sub. I used to watch fansubs, and they did amazing with the background research and finding the right vocabulary to match the original dialogue. I learned stuff. I learned history watching Arslan Senki. I learned military terminology watching Youjo Senki. It was a labor of love.
On the other hand, the legal side of things is riddled with issues. One of the streaming services (i***x) was accused of stealing a fansubber’s subtitles down to the color code. It turned out the people they hired stole from the fansubs, because they actually had no clue how to Japanese. The official website for Love Live! The School Idol Movie misspelled the entire cast’s names. (They did fix it later) Netflix did a great job on most titles I’ve seen so far, save for Youjo Senki’s Thai sub, which had a bit of misspelling and phrasing issues. The other streaming service by my mobile data provider (AIS) also did a good job (because they rent the license from official localizers) but some titles were translated straight from English which makes the dialogue dry as hell (cough Sidonia cough). AniPlus did well in those I’ve seen. Muse Thailand did an amazing job, I have nothing to say against them aside from that the ads are so annoying lol. Recently, Strike Witches: Road to Berlin became available for streaming, and there was a big discussion on whether the sub was ‘watchable’, meaning that 1) real humans were used to translate the series and 2) it was legible and relatively accurate.
Why was this even an issue? Turns out some of the Chinese streaming app that launched their services in Thailand used Google Translate for mega titles like Attack on Titan, Love Live Nijigasaki, and Kimetsu no Yaiba. It was so bad. Nezuko’s name was translated as ‘my ghost peanut’, and the rest of the sub was barely legible. Almost every girl from Love Live used male pronouns and speech articles, which was extremely annoying and made every one of them into some kind of trap. Some of AoT’s character names were spelled with romanji instead of their English equivalents, and this one app translated a 150mm gun as 150cm. (They’re hiring people with N1 Japanese, but those people still make mistakes regarding lore and trivia in the story, like that gun thing…)
On the manga side, a lot of publishers here are notorious for dropping titles without saying a word about it, leaving readers on a permanent cliffhanger. Some are also known for printing errors and translation mistakes, and one in particular had a very bad issue with yellowing paper. The worst ones are better than some scans, but it makes people who spend money on them disappointed, nonetheless.
This is not to say that we should all ditch legal stuff. Legally gray zones like fansubbing and scanlations may help promote content, and some fansubbers I knew were hired by streaming services because they were known by the community to make very good subtitles. However, these services legally acquired their content, and watching them means supporting the people who created the anime. Okay, animators are horribly underpaid, but at least it keeps the studios running.
Don’t like the subs on your service? Hey, just switch to a new one with better subtitles!
Is it because of the economy?
Here is the thing: my elementary school self (that watched pirated Katekyou Hitman Reborn on Youtube) could never have afforded the legal CDs for the whole series, period. It was expensive as f*ck for a kid at that time. The only series I watched legally at that time were those on free TV (+Animax) and Saint Seiya Chapter Elysion. Yeah, because I love Saint Seiya that much. I was super surprised my friends bought the whole series for Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles. It was a fortune, but she shared it with her brother so… half and half?
The thing is, legal anime was not cheap. The TV channels did have mainstream series like Yu-gi-oh, Pretty Cure, Inuyasha, D Gray Man, Bleach, and other whatnot, but some series you want to watch but the licensors were someone who only made CDs, you can’t watch those unless you pay up.
Yes, it is how things are supposed to go, but considering people view ‘anime’ as ‘for kids’ (anime is literally called Japanese cartoons over here), adults who aren’t willing to pay so much for their kid’s entertainment ultimately turned to pirating. Yeah. My family did that, and it was because I was so persistent. Sorry, mom.
Going back to the copyrights issue, if people can make money off selling pirated stuff, then why not? They gotta eat too, you know? Gotta do what you gotta do. It’s not like yer developed country where social welfare is your everything.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, this shouldn’t be a problem anymore with streaming becoming more and more affordable. But illegal stuff are still circulating because people still wanted to spend their money on something else… like food.
In Conclusion
A combination of lack of understanding, WTF legal subtitles, and a systematic issue to do with money. Hopefully with more understanding and the community’s active stance in promoting legal content, we’ll see that money goes into the right pockets and finally Thailand will not be known as pirate land anymore.
bonutzuu 
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