To be fair, on my Japanese keyboard, it’s actually shift+7 to get the apostrophe. I’m not sure if that counts as “a lot more steps,” but I agree that the difference was probably physical vs. phone keyboard.
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This is neither here nor there really, but I thought Animelon’s content was protected under the fair use act?
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It’s possible to use animelon to watch shows for free for no other reason than because you want to watch them. That would eliminate any hope they’d have of successfully using fair use as an argument in their favor.
Generally speaking for fair use arguments to succeed, they can’t substantially serve as a replacement for the commercially legitimate option in question. They offer a way to watch entire shows, not just short clips or screenshots, to my understanding.
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I see, that makes sense!
And yeah, looking into it further it seems that the creator acknowledged the illegality of it all from the beginning. A shame they haven’t been able to properly pitch it to a big commercial licenser because it’s an amazing tool.
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Yeah…
I see only two possible solutions – either they would purchase the licenses and become a subscription-based service like Crunchyrol or a site like Crunchyrol would implement their functionality.
As a matter of fact, Netflix has quite a lot of anime, and IIRC at least some of them have Japanese subtitles.
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They could also just post three to four minutes from each episode that had better-curated subtitles. Maybe not as fun as watching a full episode, but it would almost certainly be legal, and could potentially leave room for better subtitles, maybe they could even add annotations about confusing grammar? idk.
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Yes I was talking about regular qwerty keyboard with real keys. So it’s no more extra steps. Just a pinky finger rather than index finger. It’s just what I learned first I guess.
On my phone I don’t use qwerty keyboard to type Japanese. I use the あ か さ one. I’m not sure what it’s called.
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“Swipe keyboard” is the typical English name.
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I’m familar with Swipe (and Swype) but I doubt that’s the name of this.
On this page they just call it 通常のキーボード. 
In the iPhone settings it’s called “Japanese - Kana” keyboard. At least when the phone is in English.
Yes, that. It’s not the Samsung thing.
Though come to think of it, it might be “flick keyboard”.
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It’s “flick”, yeah. Swype/swipe is the Android keyboard where you start at one letter and just swipe to each letter instead of tapping. In theory, supposed to be faster. In practice, it just results in a lot more mistakes for me that means I end up being significantly faster by tapping. 
handy for one-handed texting, though, at the very least.
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It’s trickier than that. Japan’s fair use laws are stricter than places like the US. Toei went after anime review YouTubers for having snippets in their videos and wanted the entire videos taken down.
To be fair, it was originally better since the old school keyboards on Android were terrible at tap recognition and slow. Now, with better predictive text and more responsive platforms, it’s more of a preference thing.
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Good point, I was thinking of U.S. copyright laws that I deal with for work occasionally. Japanese laws are more strict on this for sure. That said, I think it would still be okay if the Japanese version of an anime was published through a foreign publisher and the site hosting the educational content was inaccessible in Japan.
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Yeah, that was the compromise they eventually settled on for the YouTube thing.
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