I found this neat article about Haruhi Suzumiya and Lucky Star on Business Week of all places. From the sounds of it, Kadokawa, the distributor of Haruhi Suzumiya DVDs and related products, is giving the thumbs up to distributing of its anime shows on video streaming sites like Youtube. It’s a conundrum which has been hovering over the anime industry ever since the induction of fansubbing. Are fansubs a form of piracy or is it just free marketing? Without a doubt, the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya would have no influence outside of Japan if not for the rampant release of fansubs, video clips and fan-made videos distributed virally around the Internet.

Excluding their SOS Brigade website, Kadokawa’s budget for advertising Haruhi Suzumiya internationally was virtually zero. The only reason why North American fans still arrived in droves to pick up their Haruhi Suzumiya DVDs on opening day was because of the success of the FREE viral marketing. I say it’s about time somebody gave the fansubbing community a little credit for spreading the anime phenomenon as far as it has around the globe. I thank Kadokawa for thinking outside the box, and hope other anime companies will want to work with the community rather than alienating their own fans by handing out lawsuits.

Some quotes from the article:

“It sounds like the classic viral-marketing success story. But Kadokawa arrived at this strategy more by luck than by design. And lawyers would have been appalled by what they saw: the company allowing rampant Internet piracy to go unchecked.

That’s not how Kadokawa sees it, though. Chairman and CEO Tsuguhiko Kadokawa thinks his company has nothing to lose by reaching out to anime diehards. As he sees it, the company’s traditional publishing business has no future in the digital era. And suing YouTube for copyright infringement, as MTV Networks owner Viacom did last year, would have only angered anime fans who have been using the site.”

“That’s only part of the plan. Kadokawa wants to endorse the best YouTube videos made with its content, some of which have been watched more than a million times. It’s sending e-mails to YouTube users, asking for permission to place Kadokawa’s marque and an ad alongside their videos, and encouraging them to join the four-month-old Kadokawa Anime channel on YouTube (2,186 have joined). Which videos make the cut? “If we can feel the love from the fans, I would say it’s O.K. to leave it,” says Fukuda. He is even looking into sharing the channel’s ad revenues with users.”

“During a scouting trip to Japan, Los Angeles-based movie producer David Alpert met with Japanese studio executives and expressed his interest in buying the overseas distribution or remake rights for their anime. But when he asked for a private screening, “they would say, ‘We don’t have subtitles,’” says Alpert, a partner at film and TV production and management company Circle of Confusion. “They’d look at us, look around, and then say, ‘Check out the fan subtitles on YouTube.’”