@fallenangel8:

Everything you just mentioned involves hacking the system and is also illegal. If Europeans and Japanese imported DVD's from the US, it's called Reverse Importation (in Japan's case). In both cases you would have to purchase a region-free DVD player as they are both region 2 while the US is region 1. This is why you can't order DVD's from Amazon JP and have them sent to the US. It's the same the other way as well.

Same with iTunes. You can't purchase things from the US iTunes store unless you have a credit card with a US billing address. Now for the Japanese iTunes store JBox.com offers to sell you prepaid iTunes cards so you can purchase things from the Japanese side, and maybe there is a company that does the same thing for the US iTunes store, but it's still crossing regional lines, which is illegal in the US.

So no matter what you do you're breaking the law, and the laws you break by circumventing DVD region encoding and things such as the iTunes store are enforced by the international community (FBI in the US), whereas downloading a fansub of a show is only breaking copyright law in Japan. It's a matter of scale in the illegality.

So just to summarize, you're saying that people should replace breaking the law in one country by downloading fansubs with breaking the law in many countries while spending a lot more money for specific hardware.

Thanks,

Ichigo

If you happen to live in the US. There are many countries for whom fansubs are currently the only way to experience anime, and by the American industry trying to replace that with region specific streaming then disenfranchises the countries full of fans who might buy import merchandise and/or dvd's based on seeing the fansubs of a series.

For instance... an ex-pat who doesn't speak Japanese, living in Japan is now screwed as Crunchy and Hulu don't stream any of their content to Japan at all. Thanks to the US industry they've ruined some shows completely for fans across the world.

Thanks,

Ichigo