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NEWS: 3 Men Arrested for Uploading One Piece Chapter to English Website (Updated)

dark13 wrote:

Somewhere wrote: Also, something we gloss over as we don't give a damn about it*. The delivery company employee. The leak in the supply chain. How it's entirely possible for a speed group to release 4 days earlier than the official street date. There's just this really screwy feeling about it, on top of the guy clearly needing to lose his job. Significant difference in feel for me between that and some dude buying a copy from the store then scanning it. *how much of it is the readership at large not knowing, versus how much not caring about the gap between speed release and official release? --- Also, there is no have to pirate. You don't need to follow a series to live. It's a case of you want to follow a series. It's desire, not necessity. It's not unusual to desire; people want many things after all. But conflating the two is dishonest. okay so I had to read this 3 times just to make sure ( you make good points on some by the way ) I have to disagree,on there is no the have to pirate , some companies won't even bring the stuff people,want to see over here so in the end all you can do is pirate, so what else is there ?

Not following the series is another option.
This is not air/food/medicine/shelter/whatever else is literally necessary for survival. This is a luxury. It is a conscious choice being made as to whether to pursue or not. Whether the choice made is ethical or not is its own subject, but for intellectual honesty, let's keep it straight that this is a voluntary action made for entertainment purposes.

You actually said it right there, 'if someone wants to read or watch something.'
That's a choice being made.
Pursuing one thing or another for your entertainment is a choice you have.
If you select following a particular series, that is a choice you made. You did not have a gun held to your head by someone else commanding you to pursue this or that.

I'm not even saying a single thing about whether this is right or wrong. I'm saying that the sentiment of 'being forced to pirate' is an attempt to remove the sense of agency from it, and that's being intellectually dishonest here. This falls under actions you do under your control.

you guys make it sound like Manga panda is done
( I don't go there for One piece and other manga I can actually get with money ) but only three guys were arrested and with 4,0000 something mangas in their site I highly doubt its three guys translating all that

Chances are that, at most, less than 10 people will ever read one copy of a physical volume of manga, and there's a degree of inconvenience involved in loaning it out to the other 9. It's not as easy and as instant as simply clicking a few links.

Hmm, I guess this is how the scanlation groups deal with simulpublishing: By getting them earlier than normal.

leafy sea dragon wrote:

Hmm, I guess this is how the scanlation groups deal with simulpublishing: By getting them earlier than normal. dark13 wrote: you guys make it sound like Manga panda is done ( I don't go there for One piece and other manga I can actually get with money ) but only three guys were arrested and with 4,0000 something mangas in their site I highly doubt its three guys translating all that

It sounds like the cops caught the distributors though, who would be a key part in what they do, and they're going to have a hard time finding another one

Hmm, I guess this is how the scanlation groups deal with simulpublishing: By getting them earlier than normal.

dark13 wrote:

you guys make it sound like Manga panda is done ( I don't go there for One piece and other manga I can actually get with money ) but only three guys were arrested and with 4,0000 something mangas in their site I highly doubt its three guys translating all that

It sounds like the cops caught the distributors though, who would be a key part in what they do, and they're going to have a hard time finding another one.

It's the other way around. Publishers started simulpublishing in response to speed scanners having the latest chapters out even before the official street date. Partly as a counter measure, and partly in recognition that there was a strong demand that they the publishers weren't filling.

You sound like you're unware of what Mangapanda actually is.

Mangapanda is a scanlation aggregation site. Also known as an online reader site, and other such names. Generally speaking, they do not translate the series they host. What they do is go around to all the small fan scanlators (who typically only do a handful of series at best) grab the scanlations the fans have made available, and rehost them on their own website. Or to put it another way, sites like Mangapanda steal a bunch of fan scanlations for their own website. The result is a website with all available chapters for all series popular enough for someone to translate, with very little work on the part of the website's owners. They don't need to obtain scans and clean and translate them, they just need to code website for people to read a series, and a bot to check for the latest scans and grab them. They then just need to make sure nothing breaks and collect ad revenue.

As ad revenue depends on traffic, a lot of traffic is desirable. One of the best ways to get traffic, is to have the latest chapter of the most popular series up the soonest. So all the various online readers started ripping off scans from each other, as well as from the fan scanlators.

The reason Mangapanda is coming up in the news like this is they decided to break from the norm. In an effort to be the first one to release scans, for a handful of the most popular series (One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, Fairy Tail, and maybe a few others) they went full circle and started scanlating the series themselves once they found someone who could provide the extremely early raws they would need to be first. They might be the Mangapanda scanlation team, they might just be the people who provide the scans to the MP translation team for the half-dozen or so series they do themselves, they might only provide Mangapanda with One Piece scans. They are unlikely to be the actual owners of the website. Unless Shueisha is incredibly lucky, these guys are at most employees of Mangapanda, and are possibly mere independent scan providers that Mangapanda was using.

Depending on which it is, this will hurt Mangapanda a little in the short term. They'll likely have to find a new provider, and their new provider might not be able to get scans quite as early. It would not be a surprise to see them go from releasing scans four days ahead of the official date, to two to three days ahead of the official date.

What this almost certainly won't do however is shut down Mangapanda. It likely won't make an appreciable dent in the amount of content which MP adds, as most of that content isn't their handiwork anyways.

In summary, while this is a nice victory for Shueisha, it's ultimately a minor one. The absolute best they can reasonably hope to get from it is to push scanlations a day or two closer to the official release date.

Buzz201 wrote:

Chances are that, at most, less than 10 people will ever read one copy of a physical volume of manga, and there's a degree of inconvenience involved in loaning it out to the other 9. It's not as easy and as instant as simply clicking a few links.

Well, unless that volume belongs to a public library, but even then, only one person can read it at a time.

I find the argument that piracy helps more than it hurts a little beyond credibility. I accept that maybe it can help in certain situations, but for every one person that pirates the first episode then buys the DVD, there's probably 4 or 5 that pirate the entire series.

This sounds me like people desperately trying to justify their own crummy behaviour. How long until somebody brings out the "I won't buy manga, because not all of the money goes back to the artist" excuse (or does that only work with Crunchyroll)?

I believe library bindings are way more expensive than traditional copies to make up for that very reason. And many countries have Public Lending Rights schemes, where the author receives a royalty every time their book is borrowed.

Buzz201 wrote:

This sounds me like people desperately trying to justify their own crummy behaviour. How long until somebody brings out the "I won't buy manga, because not all of the money goes back to the artist" excuse (or does that only work with Crunchyroll)?

I'm sticking with "Crunchyroll's reader is bad" which actually works for every online reader I've ever tried except for three.

Buzz201 wrote:

I believe library bindings are way more expensive than traditional copies to make up for that very reason. And many countries have Public Lending Rights schemes, where the author receives a royalty every time their book is borrowed.

Varies by country, sure, but here the former is untrue and latter amounts to a pittance and has to be specifically applied for, not payed automatically for each loan. Side note, unless they're garbage at it, scan providers don't keep the original copy without inconvenience.

Fair enough, but I was referring to a post I saw a while back in which people genuinely decried Crunchyroll because it committed the mortal sin of paying it's own expenses and employing staff with subscriber money...

What is inconvenient about storing a file on a hard drive or keeping the source you scanned in a bookshelf? Physical lending involves a degree of inconvenience, uploading to a manga site is only inconvenient if you don't do right.