News on the Eastern Front

It recently hit Anime News Network that the Japanese government was asking the US government to crack down on illegal distribution of anime.  As usual, fans on the ANN Web-BBS thread attempted to make plenty of excuses for why this item should be discounted or ignored, usually attempting to draw distinctions that the law (and the request) doesn't.  For instance, some attempted to draw the usual bogus line between "legal" fansubs of unlicensed material, and fansubs of licensed material; someone else wanted to know whether the request included "raws" or just fansubs; and some said it wasn't anime, just copyrighted material in general (even though the request specifically mentioned anime, and no other form of Japanese IP is routinely infringed on anything like a comparable scale).  Those distinctions matter to fans.  Those distinctions don't matter to the bureaucracy, which only sees copyrights and infringement.  It's similar to the attempts fans of underage-sex fantasies routinely make to draw a line between themselves and the "actual perverts" who are completely different in some way not instantly obvious to outsiders. [635 words...]