If you are an anime fan who has been involved in this hobby since the 90s, you will know that there has been a global evolution in how anime fans watch anime from the 1980s-90s, early 2000s, 2010s and up until now.
In the early 2000s to around 2015, anime fans would typically watch anime by downloading edited anime episodes with subtitles in various languages called fansubs. These fansubbed anime would typically be uploaded to be shared with fans for free through various means, but the most popular media sharing method during that era was via BitTorrent.
BitTorrrent is a way for people to share various types of files with each other, using the methods of seeding and leeching, where the original owners of these files can share the files with other users, where the users who have downloaded the files will share the same files with other users.
This is how these file distributors reduce the cost of storing files, but still ensure that the public can access these files.
Recently, authorities in Japan have successfully arrested an individual who was an initial-seeder or first sharer on the leading anime BItTorrent website, Nyaatorrents. The operation, which was carried out by the Kyoto Prefectural Police Department, together with CODA (Content Overseas Distribution Association) and the Japan Hacker Association (JHA), identified Masakazu Ono, a 56-year-old Japanese individual as one of the initial-seeders for the pirated anime sharing site.
The way the individual was identified also seems quite interesting. The JHA uses trackers from torrent files used to download files, and see which IP address was the earliest to share these files, and after a number of these IP addresses were checked, the individual was identified as the individual sharing these files.
In addition to fansubs, Nyaatorrents also hosts files commonly called RAW, which are the original recording files of anime episodes recorded from television into digital form. These RAW files are then edited and used for subtitle translation before being repackaged as fansub files.
The CODA institution in particular was developed specifically to deal with piracy cases that occur abroad, where websites like Nyaatorrents are seen constantly moving to avoid authorities. The idea of the Japanese authorities to track the original source of anime episodes and other Japanese television series to deal with this piracy issue is a way to block the advancement of activities that are seen to cause a lot of losses to animation studios in Japan.
