A conversation during a dinner at AnimeNEXT alerted me to a possibility that I hadn’t considered before: ignorance of piracy. One of our fellows observed a girl buying Twin Spica vols. 7–8 but telling her mother and vendor that she didn’t need the others because she could read them online. When relaying this story, the teller felt the girl genuinely didn’t know that Twin Spica isn’t distributed online. Similarly, a co-worker recommend an anime to me, when I said I’d check it out she directed me to a site that was streaming it illegally. She literally had no idea the show was actually available for free on Funimation’s own site.

As a blogger and an intimate member of the anime community who has good access to people in the industry as well, I take for granted the notion of knowing when something is a fan-sub/scanlation or a pirated version of an already licensed English release. Actually, just knowing something is licensed or is streaming in the U.S. is even something I take for granted, even though I still miss announcements. I also like to think I know what sites are providing content for free, in English, and are legally doing so.

But many do not.

And as far as I can tell this stems directly from the advent of streaming content be it anime or manga. When you download something off bittorrent or seek something out via IRC, you know exactly what you are getting. But if one looks up “free anime” on Google you will find many a site that looks similar to Hulu or Crunchyroll or whathaveyou but isn’t legal; the same for looking up manga. However, how does one go about knowing that? Why just this morning, a site called Animulu started following me on Twitter saying they provide legal streaming anime, but I’d never heard of them. There isn’t some sign on these front pages saying “WE ARE SUPER ILLEGALLY GIVING YOU THESE ANIMES AND MAKING A PROFIT.”

How do you personally know the difference? How do we educate fans about it?