Forum - View topicNEWS: U.S., Japanese Publishers Unite Against Manga Scan Sites
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Sunday Silence
 Posts: 2047 |
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Way to imply it.
And your accusing me of quoting out of context?
The quote was that I want X product, not willing to pay X for product. The problem I set out has no figurative price.
Ah yes, let's make sure we don't import SM Queen Tentacle Rape Guro-chan to US shores.
The only thing I can mention is that by adding in factors that weren't in the original equation (and requested not be done to simplify the problem for starters), you've pretty much distorted the argument. |
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asura_wings
Posts: 30 |
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I would like Manga be sold on an EBOOK CD or DVD i find it hard to collect long series...
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agila61
 Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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What about an eBook USB key? I don't have laser media on my netbook. |
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LordRedhand
 Posts: 1472 Location: Middle of Nowhere, Indiana |
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@Sunday Silence: Simplifying the problem also leaves out why it's a problem in the first place. So yes including the Customer Acquisition Costs (defined here http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/definition/customer-acquisition-cost ) Can go a long ways to explaining why companies are not as keen to jump over backwards for you, simply put you cost too much for too little in return right now. It's more valuable to them to get you and others like you to being a customer in some fashion preferably in some method that combines aspects of a free method with either a subscription or e-book (or as another poster suggested CD/DVD) kind of set-up. If all you are is a consumer of their product your not exactly helpful.
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Shiroi Hane
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 7580 Location: Wales |
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You are conflating "not doing something" with "refusing to do something". I'm never likely to visit Bumfreakingstan because I have neither the money nor the desire to do so. If someone offered me an all expenses paid trip, I wouldn't refuse. Same would apply if I wrote a book. I'm not going to go out of pocket translating and shipping copies to somewhere in the middle of nowhere. If some fan of my books translated it into Bumfreakingstanian and shared it with a few like-minded friends I wouldn't care and probably wouldn't even know. If that lead to a local company seeing a demand and offering to translate and sell copies of my book there and pay a license or royalties to do so - great. If, however, the lingua franca there was something like Cantonese, Mandarin or Spanish and that translation went on to be shared on a global website with millions of viewers which earned enough money in ad revenues to place it's own ads on other related sites (true story - I had to inform manga.co.uk that they were displaying mangaf*x ads on their site) and was popular enough to be in the top three google results for the title of my book - I might understandably be a bit annoyed. |
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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To clarify: do you wish to imply that you hold no ill-feelings towards those who consume (but do not produce or host) scanlations in St. Lucia? I have another question to ask in addition. Out of concerned interest, do you consider your "geographical" counterarguments to be applicable to the problem of anime fansubs as well as manga scanlations, mutatis mutandis? If so, the St. Lucian matter would bear more relevance to one aspect of our state of affairs. |
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Moomintroll
 Posts: 1600 Location: Nottingham (UK) |
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It's not a question of ill-feeling - it's a question of relevancy. Put bluntly, St Lucia is a completely non-viable market so it doesn't really matter what they do or don't do. Personally - according to my own ethical code - I don't think they'd be right to do so but it would be so trivial in its impact as to be a non-issue and hardly something worth bothering to condemn.
In theory, yes - there is no essential difference between scans and fansubs. But a population of 61 million in the First World is not a non-viable market for moderately expensive entertainment in the way that a population of 160 thousand in the Third World is. UK anime fans are capable of supporting a healthy domestic industry if they collectively put their hands in their pockets, St Lucian fans are not. |
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agila61
Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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But if none of the models prove out for some works, then fine, provided that nobody uses the fact that the numbers can't be made to work as an excuse to trample on the rights of the creators. IOW, regarding "You have to meet the competition and, by the way, the competition gains competitive advantage by illegal means", there is nothing wrong with recourse to legal sanction to address that unfair competition. |
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Zin5ki
Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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Precisely what one means by the term "healthy" would need to be clarified somewhat. By certain metrics one could already claim our industry to be healthy, though certainly not by others. One could ask whether the comparatively strong R1 and R4 markets are limiting cases for what we could achieve, given certain financial and technical burdens our distributors have to account for. Call me a pessimist, but I am of the belief that the success of markets such as Australia is no longer within the reach of our industries. A status quo has been established whereby fansubs and R1 imports are far quicker to obtain than local releases; a state of affairs that'd require a somewhat unfathomable amount of industrial (and perhaps cultural) change to correct. Beez' Anime Legends releases rival imports on price, but not yet regarding time-to-market. It seems somewhat implicit in these exchanges that our views on the role played by illegal content differ notably. It would be undignified of me not to respect your beliefs on the matter, for you are indeed the paradigm of what our local industries demand of us. Still, the notion of fans' habits altering by such an extent that they universally pay where previously they paid not is, dare I say, a notion I find somewhat quixotic. |
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agila61
Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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First, for supporting fans, what matters is that income gets back to the creators of the work. So if there is a legit site with free manga that runs on ad revenue and pays royalties, fine. Second, there is no need for "universally". What matters is that sufficient supporting fans, as well as other consumers for their own reasons, pay for the work to support it. |
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vashna
Posts: 1313 |
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I'm hearing a lot about CD scans. I've seen these in Western comics, but wasn't there at least one official North American manga release done this way? I want to say it was a Masamune series.
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Sunday Silence
Posts: 2047 |
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Then there is nothing wrong with companies committing Public Relations Suicide by implying your potential customer base are crooks and angering them by taking away their toys without giving them something acceptable in return all in the same swath. I leave with a final quote:
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agila61
Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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First, the rip-off sites OneManga, MangaFox and friends were never potential customers, and they are the ones that the companies are saying are crooks. So there is no "implying your potential customers are crooks" going on. Second, there are multiple efforts organized around various models to make legit online distribution available that are being established right now. Since that is going on in parallel with the enforcement sweep, the claim that they are engaged in enforcement without providing a legit online alternative is groundless. Whatever form or forms of online distribution proves to be viable will be acceptable to the actual potential customers, because that's what makes them potential customers. If you want to have a discussion about a group of companies, first, implying their potential customers are crooks and, second, not also working on providing legit online alternatives, google RIAA and go join that discussion. That's not what is happening here. |
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achyif
Posts: 1 |
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Instead of jumping into this argument here, I'm just going to post my stand on this.
Personally, almost all the manga that I've ever read were on these so-called "pirated sites". Now that the majority of the ones are gone, I'll probably start to read less (manga) and just follow my favorite series on scanlation sites. I'm not too happy about this; I am still not willing to buy manga after my previous source has been cut off. Many of the things that I like (including manga) I enjoy but I rarely buy. This is true with games, movies, music, and others. By the way, the illegal distribution of music online is very similar to the illegal distribution to manga. The biggest difference, IMO, is that manga is not as popular as music (in the US, I mean). Sure, there are thousands of people who like manga, but they're a definite minority. Manga just won't be as popular in the United States as it is in Japan. The cultures just clash. That is, pretty much, the reason why there are many unlisenced ('scuse my spelling) series in the US. I think what all these companies are doing is rational, the online manga is making them lose revenue, although seems that the exact amount that they lose unknown. Sure, some scans are definitely taking away from their revenue, although it people will begin to buy legit manga while others will stick to illegal means... But thinking about it, this attack won't benefit the manga companies by forcing current readers to buy manga, but instead preventing illegal online reading from being introduced to future readers... Still, the internet is realatively new, and who knows where it's going to go from here? |
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himme
Posts: 1 |
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I'm just thinking and typing out of my own opinion. I will first say is, for the scanlations, Fair of Use? I mean, we download musics illegally for free, yes, but we still buy the albums and go to the concerts none the less. We torrent movies and TV series, sure, we still but them, whether it's online like iTunes, or in stores like Shoppers' Drug Mart. I disagree with the people who are strongly with the decision. I read such and such like Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, etc online, but I still buy them in forms of Shounen Jump comics and actual manga books themselves. Hell I'm even buying Fairy Tail manga books while still reading them online. Free is good, and should only be used when needed, like in today's society. Where I'm living, the only mangas I can get to is Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, and Fairy Tail, since they are from the dominate Viz and TOKYOPOP. I searched all over my beloved city, and there are no places that sell Yen Press and the likes, I've seriously tried, small places that I once knew, used too, but they closed down due to them being smaller. I ask the places where I get my Viz and TOK on if they could take a suggestion of buying mangas from those companies, but ultimately it's a firm 'no'. And yes, waiting for the mangas to become translated legally takes way too long, especially when you can have non-profit groups with a small amount of people who knows the language and can translate, while big companies like Viz and TOKYOPOP has an army of paid workers. The answer is obvious, you'd go for the free, no need to wait. I mean hey, I'm still downloading musics illegally, I don't see any extreme crap going down. When the Bleach scanlations were far into the chapters of the Las Noches arc, Viz has only started it, barely. And the wait would have taken forever, especially if the anime is like 10000 miles ahead. Imagine watching the anime which is 10000 miles ahead and reading the manga from the companies, you might go, "What the cuss? -looks at manga, looks at anime- When did that happened? Spoiler much?" Maybe Manga sites should do something like Crunchy Roll, which basically makes you pay to see the episodes, but in our case scans batch that are released and won't be open to the public or normal till 2 weeks+ later. I mean look at Inu-yasha, the damn thing for Viz isn't out and completed yet, and is taking too long, and yet I finished it, online, yet I'm still going to buy it. look at Ranma 1/2. Finished long time ago but took Viz pretty much 5million years to finally done translating it and make it complete. All in all I disagree strongly with the coalition. Because, why do it when there will be loopholes out of it? Musics, torrenting, etc, all are loopholes. Everything in this life has loopholes. Maybe they're just greedy. As seeing how prices on everything is going up like a rocket. Maybe if everything was cheap, but still reasonable, then maybe. That's all, for now.
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