Forum - View topicNEWS: U.S., Japanese Publishers Unite Against Manga Scan Sites
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LordRedhand
 Posts: 1472 Location: Middle of Nowhere, Indiana |
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What your doing himme does not fall under fair us as legally (as much as it can be) Here are some sources:
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html#permission So what your doing does not fall under fair use and those sites are indeed engaging in infringement (and quite willfully as well) So you by downloading it also infringed and wasn't fair use either. Although on can give you some props for buying you could have simply bought Bleach, One Piece, and Naruto without infringing upon the rights of others at all. |
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Sora76Erlic
Posts: 3 |
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I agree with himme ~
but it doesn't solve that the legal publisher want's more is there any solution for us who don't get many manga book ? like in indonesia , carribian , etc ? |
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agila61
 Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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These sites did not make the translated manga, they just downloaded them. So shutting down these sites just makes sure that people who want to get free bootleg manga have to invest more time in looking for it and learning how to access it. If someone wrote detailed information on how to do that here in the ANN forums, the message would certainly be reported and probably taken down, so this is not the place to ask that kind of question. I personally hope that much of the manga that will be available on the new Crunchyroll channel will be available in ASEAN, but there are not details on that channel yet. I would expect it to launch in either September, back to school in North America and back from summer vacation in much of Europe, or around the northern hemisphere's winter holidays season. |
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charizardpal
 Posts: 30 |
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The reason they're doing this may also be due to the financial crisis. With manga sales lower due to the crisis (not scanlation as they claim), they're getting desperate.
The fools don't realize that closing off scanlation will make it impossible for manga to saturate America like it has Japan. There are many teenagers who still haven't ever read a manga in the US, and the fact is that manga isn't as mainstream as we anime-fans tend to assume, in our own little communities surrounded by friends of like-interest. In the long run, it would be better to let manga continue for a decade, but when they close it off the result will be a shrinking niche. |
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hissatsu01
 Posts: 963 Location: NYC |
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Oh, those aggregators were doing a fantastic job of "growing" the market all right. Just another decade to run rampant was all they needed. Sounds like a such a modest proposal. This is good comedy.
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Paploo
Posts: 1875 |
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga_outside_Japan#Indonesia You could buy manga from one of the local publishers who licenses it and translates it? I recall reading about the problems they face on Mangacast [which is down now since Ed's busy with Vertical Inc]- it seems scanlations duel a bootleg print manga industry there too, giving the pubs who licenses stuff 2 headaches to deal with. http://www.elexmedia.co.id/ Seriously, Indonesia looks to get a whack of really good manga. I'm getting tired of all these foreign fans popping up and complaining about how they don't have manga wherever they are, and yet, hey look, tons of pubs in http://www.chuangyi.com.sg/new2/index.php Singapore [chinese+english!], Australia [Madman imports/pubs stuff], Brasil http://www.paninicomics.com.br/web/guest/home and a bajillion other pubs worldwide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_manga_distributors Maybe you'd get more manga in your countries if you'd support them instead of reading all your manga online? I'm very relieved that for the most part, ANN's posters are being very polite and supportive about the decision to close these sites- for the most part the only dissenters seem to be people who signed up to complain about the sites closing down. |
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agila61
Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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This is the false dichotomy fallacy. The economic crisis and scanlation are both factors. Remember that economic crisis does not always spell doom for these markets - the biggest anime boom in Japan was the Lost Decade after the Japanese housing bubble collapsed and while Japanese firms spent 10 years building up capacity overseas instead of Japan to outsource the labor intensive parts of their production chains.
But the saturation of manga in Japan is inside the market. Despite the plausible sounding arguments about how free content on the internet boosts the market, the explosion of growth in viewership of bootlegs did not do anything to boost the manga market. Indeed, banking the survival of the manga industry on manga saturating any market outside of Japan would be a reckless move from an optimistic perspective ~ a suicidal move from a pessimistics perspective. Far more intelligent to pursue development as a niche market in a broad cross section of countries, which is an opportunity that opens up with the big roll-out of strategies to put legit translated manga online.
This is true, its just the conclusion that it drawn from it of "saturation or death!" that is misplaced.
Remember that the manga market grew in the first place without any substantial online presence. And the past two years have proven that the manga market was not gaining any benefit from the explosion in bootleg views. If the legit online sites get only a fraction of the audience that the bootleg sites did, but the legit sites channel the audience into the broader market, unlike the bootleg sites which pull the audience away from the broader market ... that's a net win. |
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Tamaria
 Posts: 1512 Location: De Achterhoek |
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Very unlikely. Taking measures against these scanlations sites isn't cheap and publishers are well aware how easy it is to start a new one. They're not trying to get rid of everything forever, they're buying time so they can introduce their own alternatives. If all goes well, those alternatives will become the first stop for digital manga reading instead of scanlation site X, Y or Z. |
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Paploo
Posts: 1875 |
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There's also the fact that as they do close more sites, other sites will fold out of fear of being sued as well- MangaHelpers announced their closure shortly after the coalition was announced [and announced the stuff about OpenManga], and I imagine other sites could make a similar option. I mean, they've already gotten a fair amount done without actually have to take anyone to court ala HTMLComics, although MangaFox looks to be rather stubborn about things.
So, hopefully it'll force some sites to change their focus voluntarily, whether it's becoming a simple fansite, closing, or moving onto something more legit. I imagine this is a long term commitment as well, since it'll take awhile to build their own digital iniatives and get those off the ground. Keeping the coalition in place will make legal action more affordable across the board, and it also has the benefit of protecting their interests in other regions whose manga publihsers have been undermined by these sites, like many Asian and European and South American publishers. |
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charizardpal
Posts: 30 |
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Again, scanlation isn't as big as a factor as you think. Scanlation has been there since the very beginning, and its half the reason there grew to be a market for manga in the frist place. Why do you think they're clamiping down now? Its because manga sales have plummeted in the US since 2008. Why that date? Because of the recession, duh. If scanlation was a problem, they would have clamped down in 2004, 2001, if not earlier. They're misdiagnosing the problem.
But how do you know that for sure? Can you really say that Spice and Wolf the novel or the manga, would ever have made it to american shores if there hadn't been fansubbing of the anime and scanlation of the manga? Fans wouldn't have known about it, and publishers wouldn't have taken interest in it. I take it there wouldn't even be a description in English of the manga (except if you're lucky, on some obscure blog) of the story if fansubbers hadn't translated it, and people hadn't started talking about it in English. I choose the Spice and Wolf example because its a name that's popular enough to be familar but its still not a mainstream shounen story. I see it as at least partially niche. The smaller niche mangas are the ones that will never become popular in the US until scanlators bring them attention, because english publishers are afraid to take chances on unknown products. Once they see that the product has a following, they'll jump in, and sometimes even hire the original scanlator to make the official localization. Now the big titles like Naruto, Bleach, Dragon Ball Z, Fruits Basket, or Card Captors Sakura, that have made it big in Japan and would make it big in America, don't need scanlators because publishers are already willing to take risks. But even so, there are still plenty of people who end up buying Naruto merchandise who wouldn't have if they hadn't started following the released scansubs. And just because a mangascansub receives say, 1,000 downloads doesn't mean that 1,000 people would have purchased that manga if it had been sold at full retail prices on the open market. Overall there is a lot of money that isn't visiblle in a closed system.
You're missing the point. The goal I'm suggesting is no to saturate the current market of teenagers and young adults, but rather they should work to expand the future market, and allow manga to exist in English in as many forms as possible. Certainly publishers have yet to take a favorable approach to digital formats and that's a void left to be filled by fans. Perhaps I shouldn't have used the word saturate, and that might have removed the confusion. Its matter of whether you want to cash out now, or build a market of readers for decades to come. Have you been to Japan and seen salarymen and women reading manga on the subways? I have never seen a businessman reading a manga in the US, and most women seem to loses interest in manga after they outgrow shoujou manga in their late teens and do not graduate to the jousei comics in the US as they do in Japan. There is a lot more exposure that could occur in America, which hasn't happened yet. Japanese readers spend about 8x more on manga than the rest of the world combined, and that's not something that's going to happen in the US if fans are afraid to scanlate niche, quaint titles that miss the big publisher's eye, but appeal to someone who hasn't ever read a manga in their life. There are all sorts of imaginative manga storylines out there, like with kitsunes, etc, that might interest readers, but don't exist in English.
I don't remember using the world death and I'm not talking about "death" in the sense that manga vanishes overnight in the US. Rather I think it'll remain for a long time, but I do think they'll miss the opportunity to allow their market to expand to reach the proportions Japan has. And its quite possible it'll shrink too--have you noticed that the manga section at your local bookstore has halved in the last tw years? Honestly with the current financial situation, non-otaku just don't have money to spend on published manga these days, and people don't buy many books at the bookstore anymore. How do manga publishers (small or big), believe they can persist when their old business model can't weather new times?
Again you can't quantify anything when there is a recession going on. Scanlating and those aggregate websites existed before the financial crisis, but we never heard the publisher's war cry back then. Its only when their market shrinks that they panic, and take action to threaten people for a few extra dollars in "lost sales," ignoring the lost sales of the future if the economy picks up and people have remained interested and thoroughly exposed to manga on the internet--where people are nowadays. (Not at the bookstore, or beside a bookshelf.) As for your point about manga growing without an online presence, yeah that's undeniable I'll grant you that. But that doesn't mean removing manga from the internet (even if that were possible), would return people to buying manga at the bookstore. I never got to make this point either, but I haven't seen any particularly novel or interesting manga at a bookstore in the last few years that screamed "I must buy it!" but then maybe I'm old and already jaded. Certainly I haven't seen something original for a long time. |
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charizardpal
Posts: 30 |
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I like your reasoning, but I don't think many of them will ever go full out to support their own alternatives. These companies never moved towards producting more manga cheaply even for the more popular series in the US, because they sought higher profit margins on smaller numbers of volumes. Its just like how publishers (especially of textbooks) refuse to cut the price of their digital books beause they aren't used to lower profit margins. The result is a lot of illwill towards those publishers, and people buying used books just because the digital ones are so expensive, (assuming they don't just pirate them.) Or consider how unreasonably high the Barns and Noble's digital book reader, the Nook is going for. The screen is a monochromatic LCD, and similar devices have predated the ipod and ipad, so why is it still so expensive? Barns and Nobles is so entrenched with their old business model of expanding their large brick and motar stores, that they can't seem to break free, even when the market is leaving them. The fact I've been trying to illustrate is that publishers in the manga industry and outside of it are just as hidebound as Barns and Nobles. |
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