Japan to Step Up Fight Against Counterfeit Anime Goods Overseas; Part of Moves to Boost Content Industry

The cynical side of me thinks that the government is just trying to appear to be doing something, although the article did mention things like

To address the shortage of anime creators, the government will improve working conditions at production studios. It will also establish a certification mark that will be awarded to anime produced under appropriate working conditions.

Not sure how effective they will be, but at least good that they acknowledge there is a working condition problem.

Yet again, the Japanese displaying a clear misunderstanding or willful ignorance of the positive effects of piracy on business and consumption.

If you target piracy, your product becomes harder to get or find, discoverability goes down especially among people that cannot afford to buy it, then you lose even more money since people that could maybe afford only some avanues of paying for your product are now priced out of the products entirely. This happens all the time.

The GameCube is my favorite example. It was hard to pirate games for. Unsurprisingly, the console sold really, really badly in South East Asia. At the same time, PS2 and Xbox both used normal disks, and consequently, since games could be pirated easily, those consoles outsold the GameCube in South East Asia. Nintendo was a victim of their own hubris, their attempt to reduce piracy literally meant they got outsold by their competitors. This is not a unique experience, this continues to happen again and again.