Choice quotes by Odex (Stephen Sing and Peter Go)

A character with the online nick “xysing” has been found saying some interesting things in online forums.

“Nope~ Me too busy sueing people~ (o.o)y”
“Hahahahah! I double-6-ed so many downloaders~ serve them right! (o.o)y”
~posted by xysing in SCORD forum

And thanks to Hardwarezone EDMW’s CSI team, (thread here) It would appear that xysing is Stephen Sing Xin Yang. Which Stephen? That Stephen who is one of the directors to ODEX and the Secretary to Anti-Video Piracy Association of Singapore. Credit to Ferolare, who did up a wonderful entry compiling all the “evidence”.

If this is the attitude of Odex directors, then there’s really nothing that can defend what Odex is doing isn’t it?

Of course, recently, the Newpaper did another article on Odex, filled with many quotes from Mr Peter Go.

He told The New Paper that a US company had been hired to track down the illegal downloaders…. …Mr Go declined to reveal the name of the company Odex hired, saying only that it was also involved in several high-profile copyright infringement cases in the US. He said that the data collected was then used to obtain a court order. The court order required Internet service providers (ISPs) to provide the account information of users whose internet protocol (IP) addresses had been linked to illegal downloading.

Users who admitted to the downloads were made to pay between $3,000 and $5,000 in reimbursement fees to Odex, according to Mr Go.

‘The money they’ve been made to pay is to cover the costs which Odex has incurred.’ Mr Go said besides the usual legal fees, they had to pay the ISPs for identification of users, the US company hired to track illegal downloads, as well as the additional administrative staff.

Said Mr Go: ‘We just haven’t finished matching the data obtained from the other ISPs yet. We are not targeting any ISP in particular.’

He said: ‘There are so many ways people can get their anime fix. ‘And our VCDs and DVDs are already priced about as low as they can go, but people still aren’t buying. ‘It’s very sad.’

This pretty much clarifies a few stuff. Starhub users are not spared. No, Odex did not just pay singnet for finding out who downloaded stuff. They actually went through a court order.

To balance things out a little. Do keep in mind that there are also difficulties that Odex faces in producing your anime dvds/vcds. Firstly, they are only able to release old series (at least 6 months after shown on TV), because of tokyo companies. Fair enough. Sometimes they do weird things to their sub and the anime to get pass singapore’s censorship. Uh ok.

Yeah, it’s sad that nobody wants to buy their products. Well.. I think the quality of their products are damn sad too. Blaming poor quality subs on the fact that translations are outsourced? Hello…. that’s just an excuse. Shouldn’t they do their own quality checks. Maybe they can try targeting the fans who wouldn’t mind paying a premium for good quality as well as extras?

He said: ‘We would like to avoid getting to the point where we have to raid the homes of those who download illegally. But if this continues, we may soon have to.’

Yup. Way to go. Definitely the most reasonable thing to do. YEAH RIGHT -_-”

Riuva and Bjorn both have entries with regards to the newpaper article.

I don’t know whether it’s true if Odex is being pressured by Tokyo TV to go after illegal downloads. But their attitude towards it just plain suck. Now everybody is just living in a climate of fear. This is crap. Really. Yes i know, warnings were given, but few had heard about it. And the way things go now, there’s this impression that nobody is being given a warning chance.

Loving anime in Singapore is a miserable thing to do now

Update: Ferolare has another entry, complete with pictures for easy reading

Impz on THAT has a good article on why whatever rants the community does, will not hurt Odex. In fact, immature rants only make the community look back. While I feel for those who are being served letters by Odex, I totally agree with him, which is why I keep trying to correct misconceptions about what Odex is doing.

In this entry, I’m basically upset about the attitude of Mr Stephen towards the whole issue.

Update 2: News reports that starhub received court order regarding this issue of illegal anime download.

Anime distributor Odex Pt. Ltd. said StarHub, a telecommunications, Internet and cable company, was ordered to reveal about 1,000 of its subscribers accused of downloading anime illegally.

a suit against a third Internet service provider, Pacific Internet, for the right to track down another 1,000 customers suspected of the same offense, Sing said.

Update 3: Ruiva has another entry filled with insights. (probably from his meeting with Odex as well as his personal thoughts) I agree with most (if not all) of his points.

11. How are the letter targets chosen?
Randomly. It does not depend on the volume of download at all. This is because Odex wants us to realise that ALL forms of downloading is bad and ALL should be stopped, so even if you’re just downloading one a week, you’re still at risk. But if you are a chronic downloader, it just means your chances of winning any case are slim obviously.