Like it or hate it, you gotta admit that Naruto: Shippuuden still has fans. And with anime fans, comes subbing groups.

And for those who want to enjoy the latest episodes legally, here’s some good news:

The Japanese broadcaster TV Tokyo has announced that it will begin streaming English-subtitled episodes of the Naruto anime series, about one hour after their Japanese broadcast, to paid monthly subscribers worldwide on the Crunchyroll video service on January 8, 2009.

And for those who don’t want to sign up for Crunchyroll,

The North American anime distributor Viz Media has announced that it will begin streaming the latest episodes of the Naruto Shippūden anime sequel within a week of their Japanese broadcast premiere for free on January 15. The next latest episode will be added with English subtitles every Thursday thereafter.

A lot of fans usually get their fix by downloading these fan-subs. They usually reason out that either licensed copies either come too late or are just really poor in quality and as with a lot of people–the show is simply not available legally. Some fans will eventually end up buying the official DVDs when they come out. Most, however, don’t–it’s cheaper that way. Still, it still violates intellectual property laws.

Now, a lot of license holders will do what they can to fight piracy. Some approaches include: DRM which we all already know just doesn’t work and just provoke the pirates for more creative ways. Another approach involves having ISP fork out their logs and then they sue the downloaders or scare them into settling. You don’t have to look far in the interwebs to find out that this approach usually end up in suing nine-year olds and a lot of bad PR.

Another approach is to give these fans with quality and legal alternatives. A lot of studios are already doing this and TV Tokyo and VizMedia is on the right track for this one.

Link to TV Tokyo announcement (Japenese PDF)

Link to Anime News Network Article 1, 2, 3

Link to Dattebayo (primary Naruto subbing group) announcement…which is not a troll

Tags: anime, Legal, Naruto, Shippuuden, Stream, TV Tokyo, Viz Media

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.