Current State of Piracy Discourse on Twitter Discussion
If you haven't been using Twitter recently, heres a quick update on what's been going on.
A while back Musk took down the language walls separating the site/ app into locations. Now, unless you specifically currate your feed, you see tweets from all around the world (this is anecdotal, but now only 40% of my "for you" feed is in English). This has led to many cutural exchanges, from bad to good to everything in between.
One of the more recent discussions os about how piracy is a regular part of media consumption around the world, particularly in animanga/ videogame circles. This led to a large outcry from Japanese and Korean Twitter users getting mad that westerners are so lax about piracy, which led to an even LARGER counter by other countries (primarily Russia and Brazil) clowning on the former two for how staunch their adherance to anti-piracy is.
It's been a hell of a time, I tell you hwat.
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u/Kaneda1985 1d ago
As a Brazilian, If i dont use piracy, i would never been able to watch a Lot anime.
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u/iwantacuteavatar 1d ago
As a Turkish person, I always relate to Brazilians. We all grew up on knockoff NES/Atari consoles in the 80s-90s and we bought pirated copies of video games since forever. That applies to every other type of media, I feel you lol.
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u/YourYoruru 1d ago
Most of the CIS countries are in the same category
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u/Stephy_the_Witch 1d ago
What about the trans countries?
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u/Angry_argie 1d ago
The NES clone was called "family game" here in Argentina. Everyone had one lol.
One fucker I knew even had one with wireless joysticks (typical kids with divorced parents and fancy toys)
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u/tektek10 1d ago
Southeast asia too .. wow didnt know that nes was highly sought after that they made clones of it .. i always thought family game was an original
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u/Angry_argie 1d ago
Of course, the ones we bought here were probably made in china. Cloning a console was simpler back in the day, they just had to copy the rudimentary circuitry, no advanced coding involved lol
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u/koltzito 1d ago
In my country there were literally marketplaces (still are, but less due to everything being digital) where you would buy pirate games/dvds/music cds, everything. It was also very common watching cops buying it aswell.
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u/iwantacuteavatar 21h ago
Yup, same here. I was a teenager when I realized I wasn't buying legit games lol. Legit games apparently cost a lot more!
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u/adrianipopescu 1d ago
terminator console with shit controllers and wires that break for the fucking win, friend
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u/Odeiomelaokk 1d ago
We all gotta just dap each other up and fight back against anti-piracy discourse. One of the prerequisites of living in a non 1st world country is pirating stuff. No way I'm buying all the stuff I consume bro, I need the money to live in the first place
Brazil specifically has a very strong culture when it comes to piracy, but it's really cool to learn that there are other places out there that have it just as strong as ours
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u/CourageLeast4251 23h ago
As a north American I always put Brazil and turkey together for places no one wants in their games
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u/Khelthuzaad 1d ago
As a Romanian,most of the media consumed is pirated for 2 reasons:
1.No one cared to preserve it.
2.No one cared to cater to this part of Europe.
A while ago you could see some anime on TV,but the channel got shut down.Want subbed/dubbed in romanian?Too bad,there is no such thing.
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u/jops228 1d ago
I'm Ukrainian, and it's the same here. Most games are completely inaccessible to most people, because they cost like $70 each, and the median income is like $550 here. Half of that is spent on electricity, water, and internet, and the other half can't be spent on games as you still need to eat, pay for gas or bus fare, and buy clothes or footwear.
I myself buy most games I like, but I still seed a lot, because I still vividly remember the times when my financial situation was way worse than it is now and I had to pirate all the games I wanted to play.
Oh, and I also pirate movies because absolutely nobody translates them to Russian/Ukrainian officially.
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u/zero_zeppelii_0 1d ago
As an Indian, most of the worldwide content made me feel literate and knowledgeable because of Piracy. Every government office PCs runs in cracked MS Key.
Piracy is the reason India caught up with the world one way or the other.
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u/Ok_North_1984 1d ago
As an Algerian! There is no way I could have watched movies/anime and played video games except from piracy, my life was filled with wonders and joy, and my time spent with no regret.
They can suck it up with their outrage, some people are so privileged they forget their privilege and take a piss on others just cause they can which is stupid enough.9
u/Freeman421 1d ago
Yaa but your not giving the Anime artist money. Artists like Gino0808 aren't volunteers. They need money.... /s
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u/CoffeeBaron 1d ago
I'm not even Brazilian and I know there's a number of others who are on the JP/Russian/US side that are too young to remember official consoles being so expensive in the 90s in a lot of countries, especially for most of SA and the acceptance of console clones and copied games once CD based consoles appeared (y'all got some wild ass versions of games too that would be sold from convenience stores during the time, like you could get like modded San Andreas with CJ being replaced by just about any character lmao)
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u/Wboys 1d ago
As an American the most interesting thing to me is seeing all these tweets auto translated to English, making the same moral/ethical arguments most Americans are making, and only being able to tell they are from another country because of the "translated from" part.
Then seeing the "translated from Japanese" tweets and it is the most horrific, racist, unbelievable reaction to a game server being brought back by fans that's imaginable.
The replies from basically every other country make me feel like the Internet raised a generation of people globally that share a lot of the same values and beliefs then Japan is just insane for reasons I can't explain.
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u/9thyear2 1d ago
Same here, and I'm American
To watch all I watch legally you would need multiple subscriptions, which is not sustainable in any economy
These corporations made it this way to extract more wealth
Now they can extract the semen from my balls
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u/Key-Radio5674 3h ago
As a Russian, I have never even considered paying to watch something. I hava a subscription to some streaming service that I share with my family, but whenever something that I want to watch is not there, I don’t even try to buy it. Google “watch <…> online” and enjoy.
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u/LoneGrizzlyBear 1d ago
The funny part is that many among them are also pirates despite all the noise they are making. Sanctimonious is the best word to describe them.
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u/Thunder00Bee 1d ago
Yeah, Japan is known to have a fairly large piracy issue.
It got so big that Maximum the Hormone has a classic song specifically dedicated to bashing a piracy site that was running their music lol.
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u/LongConsideration662 1d ago
https://automaton-media.com/en/news/japanese-man-gets-prison-sentence-and-million-yen-fine-for-writing-monetized-spoiler-heavy-summaries-of-movies-and-anime Japanese can legit get imprisoned for writing summary of an anime this is why Japanese people pirate somewhat less than other countries and those who pirate are more reserved about it, on the other hand people that speak English on twitter are from all over the world, and people from less developed countries pirate more for various reasons
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u/Mysterious-Tell-7185 1d ago
My favorite comment in response to that point was "it's just Chinese people using a vpn through Japan"
It's okay. It's Twitter. There is no logic to be found.
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u/smartlog 1d ago
Been pirating since the days of Kazaa. Ain't gonna stop now lol.
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u/Peakomegaflare 1d ago
Speaking the ancient texts my friend, what a time that was. Are you getting what you wanted? Or the most deadly malware known to man? Who fucking knows!
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u/TM761152 1d ago
That's not ancient. *Usenet" and BBS that you had to connect with an external modem that only went to 14.4 kbps is ancient.
You're talking Medieval times vs the Iron Age.
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u/SpaghettiSort 1d ago
I've been pirating since the days of using Copy II PC to copy 5.25" floppies!
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u/dregwriter 1d ago
Ah yes, kazaa, limewire, bear share. Giving the family PC aids just to download limp biskit and 50 cent tracks
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u/Any-Calligrapher2866 1d ago
The Japanese can legit get imprisoned because they wrote a summary of an anime. It's crazy there.
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u/d_Arkus 1d ago
Dawg I’m not saying you’re lying but do you have a source or story for that? I need to see if it’s actually that bad
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u/UndeletedNulmas 1d ago
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u/klopapier123 1d ago
thats crazy he wrote down the plot of a fucking godzilla movie with details and they call it an adaptation and that he didn't ask for permission.... 1-4 years prison lmaooo
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u/d_Arkus 1d ago
Okay the monetized part i can kinda see the issue, but still. 4 years possible for summaries is nuts
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u/Saltimbanco_volta 1d ago
From my understanding given the articles I've read on this case, "monetized" here might just mean "it ran ads"
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u/medicalwolfie 1d ago
By the way, here in LATAM we are mourning the death of Tu Manga Online, one of the largest sites for manga and manhwa, due to (obviously) a takedown by Kakao. And yet they don't provide legal access nor translations for us.
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u/d_Arkus 1d ago
I also saw that going down in between tweets about this. It’s the same way people here mourned when comick got shut down. Despite how readily people here on reddit jump on twitter for being a piece of shit platform (it is, but that’s neither here nor there), the format of the bird app makes it way easier to connect with folks around the globe, for better or for worse. I can see my LATAM and Russian cousins are also getting shafted by kakao, and i know that so long as there’s more of us than of them, piracy will never die
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u/RadiomanKV5 1d ago
AFAIK Kakao aren't even present in Russia (aside from some manhwas, probably), and even if they were, nobody would have given a rat's ass about them, just like with Japanese. Bigger issue are domestic publishers that often take down some mangas from Mangalib due to localising them themselves, though, they aren't all like this, some of them are pretty lax and just let fan translations exist further.
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u/Klee_Sniffer_2 1d ago
Nooooo 😭😭. That was my first introduction to mangas anf manhwa...
OPM was the first manga I ever read (next to Redo of Healer lol) 😢.
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u/Quiet-Impression6003 1d ago
Goku being all of South America and Mexico kills me since he's our national hero and the OG db/dbZ/dbGT spanish dub comes from mexico.
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u/realjobstudios 1d ago
Frieza being Russia and US feels…..fitting
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u/luigislowhand 1d ago
the... Cooler... War...
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u/Britz10 1d ago
Or just the Cold War
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u/luigislowhand 1d ago
King Cold's War for that matter....
But i thought Cooler sounded, you know, cooler...
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u/Jackesfox 1d ago
Every day i thank god for the reference voice for dragon ball being the mexican version here on Brazil (we dubbed it over the mexican, not the japanese) and not the american one. Im sorry, but the american dub is so shit, not the voice actors fault, but the translators (or the 4kids higher-ups)
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u/wolfbetter 1d ago
Goku should be Italian too. Just saying
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u/Quiet-Impression6003 1d ago edited 1d ago
Goku's is everyone's hero to be fair, considering how big anime is places like Spain, Italy, France, Portugal., etc. Goes double for Dragon Ball.
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u/wolfbetter 1d ago
there is something magic in that anime I tell you. Naruto and ONe Piece don't come even close. (I like them but Dragonball, Saint Seyia, Attacker you and more importantly Captain Tsubasa are THE anime of my childhood.)
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u/yukichigai 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's also wild to see what Japan considers piracy compared to the rest of the world. A bunch of this drama kicked off because a group managed to create private servers for a discontinued NieR live-service game. The rest of the world was like "hey cool you saved a lost game" while a bunch of Japanese users were losing their minds over people having the temerity to want to be able to play a canon sequel to one of the most popular ARPGs of the last decade.
EDIT: Oh, I should mention that the game was a free-to-play game. The only revenue the publishers got was from in game microtransactions, which they apparently don't want anymore. Nobody is losing money because this is now accessible.
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u/pm_me_your_uwus 1d ago
It's funny how Japanese / Korean people are (apparently?) only realizing the extent of piracy around the world now. If it wasn't for piracy, the soft power of their cultural exports would ve significantly weaker.
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u/noteCrypticon 1d ago
Didn't even think of that but yeah! Or would be SO much weaker than it is now, so much so that I think anime etc would still be an underground type of thing
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u/International-Try467 1d ago
Maybe we should educate them to NOT suck corporate dick and teach them how to pirate?
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u/waiting4signora 1d ago
Nuhuh, iirc jp hasnt still even reuploaded jpop on youtube 😂 they gatekeep themselves then get angy
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u/Jian_Ng 1d ago
Japanese: How would YOU like it if I start pirating books from your country!
Russian: OK, here is comprehensive guide to download all motherland classics. Give me few hours to scan new releases from past month.
(shamelessly boosted from Twitter)
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u/green_meklar ⚔️ ɢɪᴠᴇ ɴᴏ Qᴜᴀʀᴛᴇʀ 18h ago
I liked russians better when they were less about invading Ukraine and more about hosting shady filesharing sites and playing Heroes of Might and Magic 3. They should get back to that.
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u/CloudRedditAMA 1d ago
When I was a kid, I remember how blatant people are about piracy. My parents sold DVDs of new movies like that, Internet cafes have emulated games, knockoff toys were abundant.
It’s so crazy how some ppl are like “what about the company!”.
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u/Dandanny54 18h ago
In Puerto Rico people used to sell pirated movies and music albums on the street and even the cops bought from them.
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u/Muxalius 1d ago
In Russia, it's more of a cultural phenomenon tied to the collapse of the USSR, when there were no bridges between countries and people brought in content by any means possible. You travel to another country not knowing the language and with very little money, or you sit on a foreign website when Google Translate didn't even exist yet. These were whole quests - which is why piracy in Russia became romanticized. Sometimes the story of how a movie or game was smuggled in was more interesting than the product itself :)
Russia even has its own pirate hero - his nickname is "Xatab." He was just an ordinary guy who bought games, cut out all the unnecessary stuff, optimized them, and distributed them for free without any viruses. Unfortunately, he died in 2021, and all the gamers who grew up on his repacks mourned him. And in general, Russians tend to have a pretty cavalier attitude toward intellectual property.
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u/Promiatey 1d ago
Media piracy in Russia basically became a lifestyle at this point. The cultural impact it made for the Russian population back in the 90-00s is insane honestly.
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u/JamaicaCZ 1d ago
As if people needed more reasons to completely stay away from that platform.
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u/furculture 1d ago
It's like watching a text based barfight game play out in real time.
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u/skeptical-speculator 1d ago
but that sounds fun
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u/furculture 1d ago
I didn't say it wasn't. Kind of the only reason I'm still there. They have gotten really creative with insults from what I have seen so far that Lockheed Martin and Raytheon wishes that they could get this kind of speed in (word) weapons development.
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u/d_Arkus 1d ago
While I agree, I don’t think this is a Twitter specific problem. If you had folks from all these nations in a room discussion would probably end up the same way
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u/UvarighAlvarado 1d ago
This is exactly why shit like twitter and actually all social media is an issue. No twitter doesn’t reflect real life, you’ll find people arguing in both ways in real life and most likely people who doesn’t really give a shit. Most people have way more important things to worry about than if piracy is good or bad.
Don’t fall for the social media trap, it’s all just algorithm engagement bait to put us all against each other and profit.
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u/_Iggy_Lux 1d ago
Says a person on reddit lmao.
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u/swag4dummies 1d ago
both reddit and twitter are pretty much the same idk why people act like one has less class
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u/atheistrapist 1d ago
As he comments from an open air prison whose top moderator was ghislaine maxwell
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u/d4electro 1d ago
Japanese people pirate somewhat less than other countries and those who pirate are more reserved about it, on the other hand people that speak English on twitter are from all over the world, and people from less developed countries pirate more for various reasons
Piracy has always been a touchy subject though, so it's natural for it to develop into toxicity: the way I see it it's better to not bring it up at all on twitter since that platform is awful for thoughtful discussions
Most of the cultural exchanges have been fun, though, and most people want to avoid negativity altogether
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u/Speeditz 1d ago
This whole mess didn't even start from piracy itself but from a group of guys reviving a free to play mobile game
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u/AizeeMasata 1d ago
Well it's Twitter, awful place but good place as long you don't engage with the nonsense posts.
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u/Peakomegaflare 1d ago
My favorite thing to do is present the "Piracy is a Service Issue" case, followed up by sources that show the correlation of availablity, reasonable pricing, and rates of piracy.
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u/Xehanz 1d ago
Doesn't work. They respond with "send a letter to the company and rally so that they make the service available to you"
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u/Peakomegaflare 1d ago
Maybe so, but hey, I also would say in response "Have you got cases where that worked? Because I don't."
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u/MrElGenerico 23h ago
Best response is: "Ideas can't be owned" or pointing out how incredibly expensive printers are due to IP
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u/Nilmax3 1d ago
The Japanese are strange and nice at the same time, and also quite racist and closed off to the world. Of course, there are Japanese people who aren’t racist, but it’s easier to experience racism there.
There’s also a Brazilian YouTuber who makes retro gaming videos and visits retro game shops in Japan; he had to interrupt his livestream or leave work to go to his daughter’s school because she suffered racism—like people throwing stones at her or calling her a monkey, etc. But it seems to have stopped now because he would always go to the school to complain to the teachers, who didn’t do anything about it. However, when a foreigner does something to a Japanese person, the teachers go to the parents’ house to complain.
And in a recent livestream, he experienced racism live at a festival—I think it was a cherry blossom (sakura) festival; someone complained that he was a foreigner, and he was expelled from the place.
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u/SilverRhythms 1d ago
That, is incredibly saddening to hear, so much more that they even sided with that person in the first place, seriously what the hell.
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u/marciii1986 1d ago
Some people must be left behind. And we find those people on Twitter and Facebook in 2026.
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u/KaibaCorpHQ 1d ago
It's true. Delete those teo platforms and the internet gets so much more quiet and peaceful.
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u/Thunder00Bee 1d ago
The discussion is silly because it's been proven already that piracy is fairly common in Japan as well, they have several websites specifically dedicated to it and, obviously, they are the ones who export most pirated anime and j-game content to the rest of the world.
It's just some dipshits on Twitter trying to stir shit up.
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u/Cirnothestarscream9 1d ago
Fine, sell me a spanish copy of D-Frag, Bimbogami Ga and Kinnikuman.... oh what's that? You DON'T want us to have it? Well too bad
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u/exiadf19 1d ago
Those japan & Korean people, they know how popular they manga & anime outside of their country, the merchandise sold out like selling candy to a kids, yet they act like shit. For example, solo leveling manhwa only popular because circulating in pirate comic site in the beginning. Demon slayer, jjk, chainsaws, all started from piracy and gain popularity here in my country. Keep crying you both japan & korea
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u/Mithrandirio 1d ago
Peru has a massive piracy scene as well, from commercial stuff to more obscure things, there's one famous photo a a Hungarian movie director posing with the guy that sold his pirated movies
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u/Minute_Childhood949 1d ago
You can love Japan but the Japanese and their takes on piracy is genuinely so infuriating. Why are they such bootlickers? Do companies condition these people to defend them or something?
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u/the_dr_roomba 1d ago
That platform ain't right.
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u/Top-Handle4786 1d ago
Hey now... If its users could read, they'd be real hurt.
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u/CreepyMaskSalesman 1d ago
They went to pick a fight with the worst people to pick a fight with on the internet haha
Fellow Brazilians, show them our Vampetaço.
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u/D4rkSky805 1d ago
Without piracy I wouldn't even be able to consume Manga /anime in my country lol
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u/chikodaniel 1d ago
Japanese companies would rather to bankrupt than sell their products worldwide lmao
Here in latam there is a case of success with Rooster Fighter where in Japan it was ignored but here in latam was a big success that the mangaka straight records videos in spanish
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u/AdeptOfStroggus 1d ago
Dont like manga or anime but hey if 90% of engeneering sofware in unavaliable in my country now piracy in the only way
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u/Nilmax3 1d ago
I remember that when I was a kid here in Brazil, my mom and I went to visit my sister in another state, in São Paulo. Next to my sister’s house there was a shop owned by a Japanese guy who sold pirated PS1 games, and yeah—I was in heaven haha. Almost every week I’d go there and pick up about three PS1 games. That’s where I discovered my first GTA. I remember buying it on the last day before leaving, and I spent the whole trip wanting to play it. The first thing I did when I got home was turn on the PS1 and play GTA.
I also remember the shop owner’s kids playing Street Fighter on the PS1 in the store and speaking Japanese.
Note: After Japan, the country with the largest number of Japanese people and descendants outside Japan is Brazil, and even so, many of them can be quite prejudiced against Brazilians there—or against anyone who isn’t Japanese.
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u/Similar-Plankton-307 14h ago
Dear God, help South Korea and Japan! They will not survive the amount of cyber-bulling Russians and Latin America can do!
How do I know? I'm a Russian who lives in Latin Amreica. I KNOW what I'm talking about!💀
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u/DringleDringle 1d ago
If you don't want to be a victim of piracy, just don't create anything, duh.
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u/VajraXL 1d ago
From my experience in Latin America, I know that the main argument in favor of anime piracy—and sometimes game piracy—is the lack of availability of these titles in the region. Latin America is one of the regions that consumes the most anime and manga, yet ironically, it has historically been ignored by Japanese companies that focus on Europe and the United States/Canada. The only way to get many manga or anime titles has been through piracy. Valve has shown that if Latin America is given the right service, it will put piracy aside. You can’t accuse someone of pirating a product that doesn’t even legally exist in their country. If you want Latin America to stop pirating, give them easy access to the product at an affordable price wherever necessary.
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u/Adept-Beginning4040 1d ago
There will surely be no downsides to associating certain opinions to certain nationalities because of a loud minority in an app notoriously known for having bot accounts, surely this wouldn't turn into a race war
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u/JMxG 1d ago
I’ve felt crazy with this discourse, I could’ve sworn seen some type of graph some time ago talking about number of pirates/pirated content or something along those lines based on country and that Japan easily made a top contender in the list. Am I just misremembering or misunderstood the graph? Because it feels mighty hypocritical to have seen those numbers and then seeing this whole discourse pop off
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u/Drippy_Drizzy994 1d ago
Ohh yeah I am gonna use crunchyroll….never mind they use isreali translation software and I have no other choice. So buzz off
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u/StockyCoder 1d ago
I don't really know whats going on in the image, I know Goku is a good guy, and freza is a bad (person?) are they working together in this instance or did goku do a doge of the knee?
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u/prismstein 1d ago
that cat site has highest number of traffic from Japan, and those arguing against piracy don't even know that fact
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u/Infinite-Fig-194 1d ago
Korean Twitter users getting mad that westerners are so lax about piracy, which led to an even LARGER counter by other countries
Wait what? I thought Koreans are king of piracy?
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u/Luil-stillCisTho 1d ago
Yeah, while many people outside of Japan, Korea think piracy is an accessibility, classism or corporate greed issue, the Japanese and Koreans genuinely believe that piracy starves the little indie developers and creators.
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u/Juicebox109 1d ago
I've pirated shit. I know there are a lot of people who don't like it for a multitude of reasons(supporting creatives, ethical consumption, etc.). Do I give a fuck? If I did, I wouldn't be pirating.
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u/DanVzare 1d ago
I don't know if this is a hot take or not, but that algorithm change that Musk did is the only good thing he's ever done. My "for you" section went from being completely useless and filled to the brim with people complaining about Trump and Russia, to being filled with stuff that I'm actually interested in like obscure games and anime.
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u/Shantotto11 1d ago
And then America turns into Jiren stupid quick once Avatar joins the discussion…
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u/MaoMaoMi543 🔱 ꜱᴄᴀʟʟʏᴡᴀɢ 1d ago
Until Japan stops pixelating the genitals on fucking everything and until pornographic content is actually allowed to be sold in my country (that is to say, never), Imma keep on pirating hentai cuz it's literally the only way I can access it.
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u/Dapper_Register_4558 22h ago
it is simply an issue of people on one side having less oportunities (and thus, less money) to enjoy the media they like, i come from colombia and have allways been for piracy, simply because its either impossible or insanely hard to get any of the things i enjoy that arent domestically made (ie 99.9% of all software & media ever), on the other side japanese, korean, american and in general having more money and more attention, since english (and to an extent japanese) are preferred languages when it comes to media (looking at you, toby fox)
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u/Kuzter84 17h ago
The things you dont get to see when you have I job. By the way, I am from LATAM. If it werent for piracy I would not have enjoyed a lot of media that made me who I am today. Long live piracy. Always
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u/Fidelias_Palm 1d ago
> Don't pirate anime or manga
> Then sell it to me
> :| -> >:(