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INTEREST: Yaoi Manga Artist Hatoko Machiyo Issues Statement on Scanslations


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Blanchimont



Joined: 25 Feb 2012
Posts: 3426
Location: Finland
PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2020 11:52 am Reply with quote
cookiemanstah wrote:
Properly backed up hard drives can mean you can keep something forever as well tho?

/corrected...
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cookiemanstah



Joined: 09 Dec 2013
Posts: 546
PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2020 12:00 pm Reply with quote
Blanchimont wrote:
cookiemanstah wrote:
Properly backed up hard drives can mean you can keep something forever as well tho?

/corrected...


what does this mean? Not conceding to the anime side of things, but I keep all my VNs and important documents in USBs that are still around ten years later.
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Horsefellow



Joined: 01 Jan 2020
Posts: 262
PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2020 12:19 pm Reply with quote
FilthyCasual wrote:
That's easy, ANN's readership and forum userbase are a teeny teeny teeny-tiny pico-iota of the Western fanbase, most of which just sticks to talking about anime with their friends and maybe a bit on Facebook. And those people pay for their shows because they're only aware of official channels. Even if they're cognizant of the existence of illicit streaming sites and torrenting, they don't bother with it because it's illegal and dangerous and virus/ad-laden and so on.


The sheer amount of people I see use those streaming pirate says says otherwise. I think the anime community is much more open to piracy than other mediums just by virtue of its history of lack of availability in the west. Also we skew younger and are more tech savvy. The nerdier a group is, the more likely they know how to do the things like circumvent rules and restrictions.

I have never heard of anyone being arrested for pirating anime in America. I don't think American licensing companies have that kind of money or authority to scare people or ISPs into submission like HBO did when they started ordering Comcast and Xfinity into monitoring and cracking down on people not only illegally streaming Game of Thrones but also people who share HBO Go accounts and let other people watch HBO content without actually having a subscription to the channel. Funimation, Viz, and Crunchyroll do not have that kind of money or influence. And even then I don't even know if the ISP will actually do anything or if it's just a scare tactic. I've heard of people who got like 30 letters from Xfinity threatening to cut their service after the 6th one and they never did. I wouldn't know since I've never done it myself or gotten any angry letters.

cookiemanstah wrote:
hard drives can mean you can keep something forever as well tho?


So long as the drive doesn't completely fail and becomes unrecoverable, sure, but that doesn't do anything for people who want a nice looking DVD or Blu-Ray packaging on their shelf.
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Blanchimont



Joined: 25 Feb 2012
Posts: 3426
Location: Finland
PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2020 3:18 pm Reply with quote
cookiemanstah wrote:
Blanchimont wrote:
cookiemanstah wrote:
Properly backed up hard drives can mean you can keep something forever as well tho?

/corrected...


what does this mean? Not conceding to the anime side of things, but I keep all my VNs and important documents in USBs that are still around ten years later.

Trust me, usb devices, like hard drives, are far from invulnerable. They may fail even in storage after a length of time, but you won't know it until you try to boot it up. So the smart thing is to back up any digital stuff you care about to another drive or discs...
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Puniyo



Joined: 08 Oct 2015
Posts: 271
PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2020 4:25 pm Reply with quote
DavetheUsher wrote:
Puniyo wrote:
The piracy debate isn't even relevant here. Even if you think piracy benefits the industry in some way, you should still agree that it's dumb to PAY for pirated content in any shape or form. Isn't the point to not pay?


These days? Yeah, you're kinda dumb you pay for pirated chapters or episodes. No excuse when it's so easy to find them for free. Back in the day? Pre highspeed internet? It depended. I'm not sure if you count bootlegs in the same category as piracy, but back when most people had dial-up and only a select few had access to cable or DSL, they'd burn stuff to a disk and sell it on eBay or other sites for a quick buck. People who only had dial up would give a dude 10 bucks for a burned CD with episode files on it, or they'd buy burned games, movies, music, shows, etc off a friend at school who had a CD burner which were kinda pricey at the time. Then you had those Hong Kong DVD sets which had like 50 episodes on 4 disks and the subs were those ugly yellow machine translated ones which were popular for awhile. In those instances people did pay for unofficial stuff since readily available archives of episodes online wasn't really a thing.


I certainly remember those days, but I'm not talking about then, and neither is the artist from the post. It's about her current work.
Back then when there were no official paths for anime and manga, it was neccesary and even beneficial, I won't contest that, but times have definitely changed.
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Zalis116
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Joined: 31 Mar 2005
Posts: 6864
Location: Kazune City
PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2020 10:49 pm Reply with quote
cookiemanstah wrote:

im pretty skeptical on most people being gullible or stupid enough to use KissAnime or something similar to where you can make the claim it is somehow outweighing torrenting. I always imagined from word of old IRC crews I used to hang with, torrenting is a lesser and safer evil if you know what to do. And also you keep your things forever at the best quality beneath retail copies.
Agreed on the "lesser evil" front, but if you go to torrent trackers and bootleg streaming sites, you can generally see the download counts and view numbers. The illegal streaming numbers on any one major site will dwarf the download counts, and that disparity becomes even greater when you factor in the dozen+ other bootleg streaming sites out there. Sure, the quality is better in the traditional downloading scene, but most viewers don't seem to care -- they're fine with watching lower-quality re-encodes of direct rips of legal streams. Blu-Ray rips get minuscule numbers of downloads, even compared to the already paltry numbers that the legal-stream rips and HDTV/edited-legal-sub releases pull in. That adds up to a viewerbase that doesn't really value collection or long-term archiving, even when it's digital and for free. It's all about the "watch stuff and discuss it as soon as it comes out, then move on to the next season" crowd now.

Horsefellow wrote:
I don't do that, but the fact some people do should show it's not always about wanting things for free and must be some kind of service issue going on. In this case it's because this title isn't available in English. Simple as that. Not much you can do about that other than ask someone to license and sell it here, but yaoi titles are a bit iffy here, especially the less popular ones. I do find it a big scapegoat when creators try to blame piracy for why their series doesn't sell well. Some creators seem adamant that their title would be selling millions if it wasn't for those gosh darn pirate sites. But I guess that's an easier way to think than the alternative of admitting that maybe their work is just not that interesting enough to draw a crowd. Curious how for some strange reason piracy never effects series like One Piece or Kimetsu no Yaiba to the point of cancellation, or other popular titles that sell well despite tons of people still pirating it.


Again, going back to those view numbers and popularity rankings on illegal streaming and reader sites: the lion's share of that traffic is there for the recent/mainstream/popular titles that are legally available in English. Obviously regional unavailability plays a role, but that's still a whole lot of piracy for the sake of getting free stuff.

Piracy isn't solely to blame for Random Title B not selling millions. Rather, it takes a bite out of everything, turning megahits into hits, hits into above-average sellers, above-average sellers into average sellers, average sellers into below-average sellers, and so on. That pushes creators and publishers to the widest-appeal, lowest-common-denominator end of the entertainment spectrum. After all, if a work targets a niche audience, the parties involved had better hope it's a niche audience that has and is willing to spend money. The history of the 2000s North American anime industry is filled with titles that were quite popular and well-loved online, but bombed in sales. We've seen this same effect in Hollywood, where practically everything's a big-budget superhero/sequel/reboot film now. They'll still spin the dial on ultra-cheap indie films and hope to score a hit now and then, but the kinds of mid-budget comedies, dramas, and experimental movies that used to be more common 20-25 years ago have largely disappeared.
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nargun



Joined: 29 Mar 2006
Posts: 924
PostPosted: Fri Mar 06, 2020 2:10 am Reply with quote
I mean, you can't pirate food but restaurants are doing it tough too. The world today faces a complex tangle of economic problems, some as a result of increasing concentration of wealth (falling real wages, rising accomodation costs), some as a result of reducing concentrations of income (increased consumption in formerly "third world" areas raising costs of agricultural products) and some as a result of reduced agricultural output from climate change.

All of which work to reduce the relative and even absolute living standards of middle-claas-and-below westerners. Piracy is what the economists call an inferior or a substitute good, consumption increases as incomes fall.
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El Hermano



Joined: 24 Feb 2019
Posts: 450
Location: Texas
PostPosted: Sat Mar 07, 2020 3:19 am Reply with quote
The only way I can see people actually paying for piracy is if it's one of those apps on the Apple Store or Google Play that have scanlations on them which are scams. Otherwise, most pirates don't pay money to read scans. I wonder if this mangaka is just assuming people pay for pirated scans and doesn't realizes they're 99.9% of the time free unless someone is trying to scam people.

Zalis116 wrote:
The history of the 2000s North American anime industry is filled with titles that were quite popular and well-loved online, but bombed in sales.


Do you have any specific titles in mind that were popular online but failed to sell well? I'd be curious to know what kind of series we're talking about there. There's probably a multitude of reasons why they failed beyond just piracy though. Are we talking the tail end days of the anime boom? Because everything I've read from industry people like Shawne Kleckner was that the bubble burst mainly due to companies over-licensing every show they could and the Japanese side was demanding higher and higher licensing fees each time which resulted in a lot of loss revenue when series would have to sell unrealistically above projected numbers to just break even. Also the shut down of stores like Suncoast which was considered the main distribute of anime DVDs back in those day. I also think that was around the time volume releases fell out of style in favor of boxsets.

I also remember back then manga and anime had a habit of being very censored. When Viz was publishing the Shounen Jump magazine still a lot of titles were toned down to keep their T rating, and the volumes themselves were never released unedited so we have numerous titles from that era like Shaman King, One Piece, Hikaru no Go, and Dragonball that remained censored to this day. I know a lot of fans who pirate One Piece and other titles from Viz to this day because they deem the translation changes and censorship unacceptable and don't want to support that practice. I bring this up because there was some dub-only releases of semi popular series back then, like Shin-chan, Bobobo, and Zatch Bell. I can totally see why no one would buy those series if the official releases were censored dub only.
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piotrus



Joined: 08 Oct 2010
Posts: 16
PostPosted: Wed Mar 11, 2020 9:41 am Reply with quote
I don't read much manga, so I might be wrong, but I am not even aware of a non-porn manga or anime pirate subscription service. All those streaming websites AFAIK are ad-supported.

I don't know about profits, TBH. I read a post by one of the people operating a relatively big pirate site that operates on ads and they said they barely break even. But that's hearsay... still, I never heard of pirates becoming particularly rich. And certainly most scanlators are either unpaid volunteers, or at best, I doubt are high earners.

In fact, I tried looking for a scam site that sells works by Hatoko Machiyo and... I couldn't find it. All I see are the usual scan sites based on the 'read all and please click our ads' model.

So I think it's the usual example of ignorance. Her works were probably pirated in Japan, maybe for profit, it's a big market there. She doesn't know how to use the net well, certainly as she admits herself she doesn't speak English so all she knows about the English market and such is hearsay, she heard there are some unofficial translations and assumed someone is making a tidy profit selling her works, were at best they are a generating few pennies through ad clicks to cover the cost of the servers hosting them.

What I do find mildy annoying here are the manga artists that are saying "there is no official translation of my works, but until there is, all my foreign fans, please stop existing, don't read my works, wait for when it is translated - if ever. I don't want you reading my stuff for free, I don't care to make it available, so, solution, forget my works exist". Sigh.
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