Forum - View topicINTEREST: Manga Creator Criticizes Publishers' Attacks on Piracy Sites
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relyat08
 Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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^^^
Yet every publisher I've talked to has mentioned that they specifically avoid looking at numbers for those sites, or actively avoid things that have fan translations at all, because they have first hand experience in how much that hurts their sales. Ed Chavez has mentioned on ANNCast a number of times how much sales dropped for a couple of series after fan translations began, I think Black Jack was one. Granted this was before digital books at all, in the late 2000s, or early 2010s, but the same phenomenon can be seen today. |
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Agent355
 Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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I've been rooting for a "Crunchyroll for manga" for years, and after Crunchyroll got manga I was very hopeful, but they seemed to have nearly stalled with only 50 series, the most popular of which being Attack on Titan. Not complaining (having Attack on Titan simulpubbed is great), but I don't understand why more publisher can't or won't publish manga chapters as they come out in Japan.
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YohAsakura84
Posts: 2 |
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The main problem is that due to licensing issues in the different countries you often don't have an alternative.
For example I'm living in Austria, so all Manga and Anime I can buy in my country are german and have to be licensed in Germany (because that's the only german speaking country in the world) and even if there are often problems with watching it legally. Anime: Violet Evergarden is airing on Netflix on Germany but not in Austria, so me having Netflix and watching it would result in using pirate sites because it is not available in my country. Crunchyroll is good for streaming in the US but in my country there are hardly any series available. Manga: Buying it digitally isn't really useful because the prices of the volumes digitally and printed are the same and I would have to download an app (which is totally crappy) for every publisher and can only use the manga in the app and never store it to read it again if the publisher loses the license and only the newst volumes are available. Manga takes forever to be published and take long breaks because they can. eg. Berserk 39: Japan: June 2017 / Germany: February 2018 Yeah, i could import Manga from the USA or Japan but let's be real it's very expensive due to shipping and you can't resell it in Austria because isn't german and convinience... |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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LOVE the concept, but it's irrelevant to western fans (which makes up the bulk of ANN's readership). I'm not sure if it will be region locked (as the one respondent you mentioned hypothesized) but I can all but guarantee that it will be in Japanese only, so it's pretty useless for the vast majority of people commenting here. |
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relyat08
Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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^I know it's not perfectly comparative, but roughly by the same token, this article is also about the Japanese domestic manga industry, and based on this guy's comments, he wasn't talking about international fans at all.
But it is fodder for their arguments, while an attempt at solving the problem is not, because anything less than everything is not enough. What people want is a site that is just like the pirate sites, that has access to all manga, anywhere in the world, and is free. The problem is that that isn't economically feasible unless you don't have to pay for the manga that you host. |
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s0nicfreak
 Posts: 21 Location: near Chicago |
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I'll be subscribing if it will take my American credit card. Not really much to say about it here since, as said, it isn't really relevant to ANN's audience. |
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SWAnimefan
Posts: 634 |
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I honestly don't blame these companies going after pirates. Because it's lost revenue, and some of that lost revenue ends up in the pockets of these pirates. For an example, some people that ran Naruto fan sites that hosted manga reading and even pirated anime earned enough money to buy houses. That's money that could've gone to the assistance and animators that live off pennies.
On the other side of the coin, some pirates had legitimate reasons.
2) Reading a series and making a decision (sometimes 3 chapters isn't enough). 3) Discovering dead / discontinued / ended titles. And yet the publishers do not listen or trying to understand. They just want to "nip it in the bud", so they get their money. Even in the legal market, they are falling behind the times with media going from physical to electronic. All they have to do is open up an online manga shop, and open it up to the world. Then piracy should decrease as fans from outside Japan will have access. Not only that, old titles can bring in new customers and earn income once again. (I bet some mangka would love that!). So this guy is right, the publishers need to listen. |
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encrypted12345
Posts: 718 |
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To be fair, Russian prices on Steam are knocked down by a lot because otherwise, they would pirate. But profit is still profit.
It depends on how you approach it. J-novel does fine getting fan-translated light novel works because they actively try to be faster and better than the fan translators, even surpassing them entirely depending on the series. By that point, the fan translators just give up. You have to beat the pirates in one thing or another. Obviously, you can't beat them in price, but you can beat them in quality, speed, or convenience. Some people will pirate regardless, but many will switch over depending on how badly you beat the pirates. |
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s0nicfreak
Posts: 21 Location: near Chicago |
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Could it have? Sites like that earn money via advertising, so it's not like the viewers are handing over money that they would instead be using to legally purchase manga/anime. Crunchyroll started out as a pirate anime site. Now it's a legal anime and manga site, but assistants and animators still live off pennies. That's not an issue that has anything to do with piracy; even when we give the companies our money, they still aren't sharing a reasonable amount with assistants and animators. |
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jtstellar
Posts: 94 |
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I think until you put a mic in an actual "publisher's" face and ask him why he thinks and acts the way he does, we're all just generalizing and speculating.
Ultimately if we really want to do that we should at least separate whom we are "talking about" into two camps.. the creators and the publishers. creators tend to see the larger picture, publishers can be people who are 60 years old and spent their whole life making physical prints, telling them that "we're moving toward digitization" can be same as telling them to jump off a nearby building, although it doesn't have to, but their thinking pattern obviously has put themselves into a bind where they have convinced themselves absolutely that there is no other way forward, for them, so rather than changing, they want to sue and use the fullest extent of the law to drag the rest of the world with them. You guys-- and I-- "Us" talking about this on the far edges of the internet is like viewing martians with a telescope and pointing fingers, no one's gonna hear you. I support sites like this financially and will gladly do so even more in terms of amounts if someone is motivated enough to actually interview one of these "publishers" who hold the so-called "old way of thinking", otherwise we're just wasting time and talking among ourselves. |
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TheAnimeRevolutionizer
 Posts: 329 |
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It is a crime to think that not being proactive in even deciding to not do something about it as those who appreciate something. Inactivity and refusal to do something by purpose at least requires thought to provoke such action. Anime fans aren't unbound to such things either. Plus there is the fact that ideas deserved to be discussed. Shame to waste such an opportunity. I've said it before and said it again. You don't make a market, you lose out on the window of opportunity. Takashi Yoshida's got it mostly on the head. The whole bit on "expanding the manga market to those from the less interested populace" is a rather dubious and razor edge topic to walk on, but even then I can see how that can go right. This is also a precarious time for the manga market overall as well, and there is no better time to talk about it. Anime and manga does need to take care of its home territory, but the need to know of its overall grander world scale of relevance is just as important. |
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Kadmos1
 Posts: 13567 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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Crunchyroll started as a pirate/fan sub streaming site that went legit. While the fall 2008 season is when they were adding more legal simulcasts, I think it was between Thanksgiving 2008-1st week of Jan. 2009 that the great purge period happened. When they started to remove the episode links. Today, if you type in 1 of the above 3612 titles in the Search bar, it will display the title but that page will say "Note: There are no videos for this Series. This page is only for discussion and informational purposes." However, a number of the above titles have returned then maybe re-removed from CR because it was added by 1 of their partners.
Sources: web.archive.org/web/20081217024621/http://www.crunchyroll.com:80/library/IndexAnime?src=subnav web.archive.org/web/20081216013859/http://www.crunchyroll.com:80/library/-Unsorted_Anime So, what is stopping 1 of those big scanlation-hosting sites from going legit? |
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jtstellar
Posts: 94 |
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I think what i said was pretty obvious and needs no further explanation, people discussing ideas up here have the practical use in the very least in venting out steam and making their own lives easier. all ideas have been discussed before as pointed out from the very start by the author on twitter, it's time to do something about it, talking to the very people in question is the obvious thing forward. |
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s0nicfreak
Posts: 21 Location: near Chicago |
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Publishers being unwilling to licence manga to such sites (or for digital distribution at all), the fact that most scanlation-hosting sites don't actually DO the scanlations and don't have the resources to do so, and scanlation sites not being able to get a huge capital investment like Crunchyroll did (Venrock gave them 4.05 million dollars). |
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Black Turtle
 Posts: 110 |
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I advice you to read that : https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170920/08463638245/eu-buried-own-400000-study-showing-unauthorized-downloads-have-almost-no-effect-sales.shtml Basically, the study asked to people how much they were ready to pay for what they pirated. And overall, the reaction was the same, if it wasn't available, I just wouldn't have watched/read/listen to it. It's only for big blockbuster, bestsellers or other highly anticipated things like that it impact the movie/book sales. In the vast majority of cases piracy isn't a lost of revenue, it just that people would have waited for it to go on TV or things like that. Now I'm not saying that to say piracy is bad, but the fact it's a lost of revenue is a myth that majors/big companies use to defend their economic system, instead of thinking how to adapt to new paradigms. "We don't have to adapt, people have to follow what we decide". And worse is : if you look at the pop culture industry, it never grossed more money that since the internet. Look at the number of block busters that beat box office records one after another. |
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