Interest
More Characters Join MAG's Fight Against Piracy
posted on by Lynzee Loveridge
The "Manga Anime Guardians" project's (MAG) "Join Us, Friends" campaign to fight manga and anime piracy picked up major steam in the last week.
The special illustration project is an effort to expand MAG's reach. As more individuals join and share the page, artist Takashi Yoshiike will add an anime character to the illustration. When ANN last posted the image, only Luffy, Naruto, Conan, Kirito, and Eren were in the picture. In less than a week, thousands more visitors joined the site and 19 of the proposed 20 characters were added to the image. The site needs to meet 1,000,000 visitors for all the characters to appear.
Artist Takashi Yoshiike added: Nami (One Piece), Kakashi Hatake (Naruto), Ai Haibara (Detective Conan), Asuna (Sword Art Online), Levi (Attack on Titan), Roronoa Zoro (One Piece), Sasuke Uchiha (Naruto), Ran Mori (Detective Conan), Leafa (Sword Art Online), Armin Arlert (Attack on Titan), Tony Tony Chopper (One Piece), Sakura Haruno (Naruto), Kaito Kid (Detective Conan), and Sinon (Sword Art Online).
The campaign is a joint production between Toei Animation, TMS Entertainment, WIT STUDIO, Studio Pierrot, A-1 Pictures, Shogakukan, Shueisha, Kodansha, and ASCII Media Works.
A total of 15 anime production companies and manga publishers are supporting MAG. The site operates a search engine for manga and anime titles and then directs users to legal avenues to obtain them. The efforts predominately focus on piracy in China where the Cultural Affairs Agency estimates a loss of 560 billion (about US$5.5 billion) yen to Chinese piracy in major cities in 2012. The Ministry of Economy estimated damages of two trillion yen (US$19.6 billion) from America in 2013.
