Forum - View topicINTEREST: Manga Creator Kohske Asks Scanslators to Stop Sharing Gangsta.
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Romuska
 Subscriber Posts: 799 |
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This is always such a difficult situation. You have a manga with an official translation that's very far behind the Japanese release and the author is essentially telling English speaking fans not to read their product until they're essentially given permission. In actuality, it's really the fault of the publishers and licencors who are incapable of delivering in a timely fashion by the current standards fans are accustomed to. As Jim Sterling once said, people want to push a button and get the thing. So the question becomes, what's stopping people from doing this and still support the artists?
In this situation it's simply the fact that Gangsta, as far as I know, is not simulpubed in English. In fact, Viz didn't publish the first volume until two and a half years after the Japanese version. People just don't have that kind of patience anymore when they have a free and timely alternative. |
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teferi
 Posts: 400 |
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CR didn't just pull away from piracy itself; large numbers of fansubbers stopped fansubbing because of CR. Most pirated downloads at this point are ripped from simulcasts even. This happened because streaming is marginally more expensive than piracy and many times more convenient. Also kind of funny how you deliberately misinterpreted the intent behind that sentence to focus on CR. Christ, try to apply any of what you said about CR to Netflix.
Because it has long since been established that the vast majority of consumers don't care. You're trying to frame this as some sort of debate on the morals when it's purely a monetary problem. Piracy stops being a problem when a business believes that they're profiting enough in spite of piracy.
Because piracy isn't a problem that consumers will willingly solve on their own. It's a problem that businesses have to solve. |
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crosswithyou
 Posts: 2892 Location: California |
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Perhaps, but that's better than them reading it illegally. Neither situation pays the publisher/author but there's a huge difference between someone getting something without paying and someone not getting something because they didn't pay. Some of the comments on the author's tweet are pretty sad... People are so entitled.
I think the existence of that "free and timely alternative" is the issue here. If that weren't available then, grumble as they may, everyone would be forced to wait. Perhaps it may result in people losing interest and not buying compared to if it were released more quickly, but it goes back to the comment I made above that at least people wouldn't be getting something without paying. |
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Ali07
 Posts: 3333 Location: Victoria, Australia |
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Yeah, when I came across her tweet, I decided to look at replies and regret it. To me, there's no justification to consume media on pirate sites. But, that's only because my mindset has always been, "Consume what is legally available", as there is so much out there. And that's even after I "limit" myself by going physical only. There's been many times where I've wanted to read a manga after I've viewed the anime adaption, but the manga isn't licensed. Hasn't stopped me from collecting a lot of other manga out there, and I always hope that the manga I want to read will be licensed. Recent example of the is Ao Haru Ride. Saw the anime, but the manga hadn't been licensed. So, I decided to see if there was a series by the mangaka, and discovered Strobe Edge. It's one of my favourite manga, and now I can actually read Ao Haru Ride for myself. Already have volume 1 and ordered 2 recently. I would like to see TWGOK manga licensed, but have settled for owning the anime series on disc. Doesn't stop me from filling out surveys asking for it to be licensed. 
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aereus
Posts: 574 |
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Part of the problem here is the perception that English scanlations are made for and consumed by strictly the licensed NA market. There are a lot of areas of the world where people learn English as a second, third, etc. language and have no hope of seeing a title licensed in their home country.
eg: Poland has very little licensed manga, but most learn how to speak/read English. Maybe it's just a convenient excuse, but I often hear that stated as a reason a group continues scanlation of a project: It's not available in their country even if they are doing stuff in English. A lot of people also read the scanlation and fall in love with a series and go out and buy the manga or merch from the series as well. Personally, I get a little offended authors always try to blame piracy on overseas: You look up Alexa rankings for popular anime/manga piracy sites and a solid 40-50% of the traffic is from Japan. Many of the early P2P applications were made by the Japanese: Winny, SHARE, Perfect Dark, etc. When on vacation in Japan I was in Book Off and the shelves were shoulder-to-shoulder people standing there reading whole volumes of manga without buying them. |
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Violynne
Posts: 128 |
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This is never the responsibility of the consumer.
Note: I'm not advocating for piracy as I don't read scans. The author has a problem with their publisher, not piracy, but refuses to acknowledge this for fear of being dropped. To get manga into the hands of readers requires distribution, and those channels are locked by publishers, usually out of pure ignorance. Piracy is the result of gatekeepers controlling the market. This has been proven multiple times, and one primary example is an online distribution site called "Crunchyroll", which started as a piracy site. tl;dr: lock up content, piracy results.
In 2007, there was a young man who wrote an op-ed to the anime industry to drop its ignorant and antiquated ways of serving customers around the world who want experience the anime as only Japan can deliver. This young man is Justin Sevakis, and he helped start ANN. Justin was not alone. Many have written to publishers demanding they drop the ridiculous stupidity of gatekeeping mentality and open manga and anime to the world. Stop with region codes. Stop with ridiculous license schemes which only force local distributors into bidding wars (something we're seeing happening again, which means the bubble burst is right around the corner). Some of these requests have made a difference. CR exists because of a mutual relationship between Japanese distributors and the fact they didn't have to lift a finger to develop the streaming platform. Manga sites exist to distribute works of many creators. But in 2018, it's still not enough. Media is a consumable product. People want it portable so they may view it at their leisure. Forcing consumers to head to websites whose media player hasn't been updated in 10 years or failure to give manga to paying customers without sub-par apps is not going to help the creators earn more money. Locking up content means piracy will result. Until publishers get this message through their thick skulls, creators and consumers will suffer at the hands of piracy. Just a side note: thanks to successful streaming sites, we're starting to see a horrible shift occur in the marketplace. Companies are now starting to break relationships previously beneficial to everyone by putting their own licenses/works into stand-alone silos. This means, eventually, consumers will be forced to either spend more money accessing multiple sites or resorting to piracy. Again, all this because publishers, not piracy, is the cause of financial woes for creators, many of whom are probably still paying for their advance. Don't know what an advance is? Best learn. Oh, and while you're learning this, take a spin on "neighboring rights" in Japan and how publishers are trying to strip them from creators. Piracy has never been the problem. Anyone claiming so is ignorant of the true issue of creator losses. |
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John Hayabusa
Posts: 1270 |
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I feel her complaint but piracy is not going to stop anytime. I am not condoning it but it is something that cannot be taken down so easily.
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MoonStar9
Posts: 24 |
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Here you have an author pleading with readers to BUY the official releases and stop pirating otherwise she won't continue and on the other hand, you have Digibro advocating for piracy to his 3.5 hundred thousand subscribers.....
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chronos02
Posts: 267 |
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This author might probably be having other issues that made her go through such an unconventional measure as asking people to stop pirating her manga. It's clear as day that only her followers will read that, and it's an ineffective method to comunicate such things (though here we have ANN spreading the news for her). Regardless of that, turning to such means is plainly strange since pirate websites outside of Japan have little influence on her sales, and, in fact, as many studies have already proven, they will increase the exposure of her work to the outside world instead of it being bottlenecked through foreign publishers choosing what manga they want to release in their respective countries.
As a matter of fact, for the past 10 years there has been a tendency in France, Belgium and Spain (afaik, other countries might be following it too), the most popular manga in scanlation websites are published officially after some months of the scanlations beginning, whereas other unpopular titles don't get published at all; and if this weren't enough, popular manga in Japan that don't do well in these scanlation websites (and aggregators) don't get published either. This, however, shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, publishing companies overseas depend on scanlation websites many times to get a first read on what the tastes in the west are like, since the tastes of the Japanese don't align well with western ones (it's not like FR and the USA have the same tastes, but they're much more similar than Japanese ones). To be blunt, manga scanlators/aggregators are a perfect place to compile market research data without having to spend thousands of Dollars/Euro/whatever and they usually provide much more accurate data than a market research could ever yield (potential taste research VS specific manga numbers, it's obvious which one is better to know, and if you doubt the numbers, a market research usually moves on the 500 to 5,000 individuals + indirect research data, while a manga aggregator(s) and scanlation websites tend to have combined numbers far surpassing 100,000 + adding the indirect research data, kinda obvious which one is better, right?). Add to this that, when a publisher starts publishing a manga title, scanlators will pull the plug on that title almost inmediately, going as far as stopping the scanlation when the licence goes live and there's still a year or more before it gets a physical/digital release, and certain manga aggregators will also remove that title from their websites when the licence goes live in their country (safe for tazmo's websites, unfortunately). So you end up with numbers and data that are basically free and with incredible precise results, those that usually read that manga online will probably not buy it anyway, but you get their data which is compatible with your country/the west, and scanlators/aggregators will pull that title off the websites they manage when you licence it. And even then, if those readers would have bought the title had there been no scanlations, it's mostly fine since the market research company would have probably been more expensive than the revenue from the sales for a bunch of manga. It's a Win - Win situation, the ONLY problem there is, is that the companies do NOT have control on how all these titles are scanlated and made available on the web, so if there's something the author says and you want to pull all their manga form the shelves (like that isekai manga from the author that made certain coments), you can't, or if you want to make certain changes to a translation... you can't. If the author breaks the contract, you can't stop the manga you (as a publisher) published from getting more exposure and thus benefiting the author and not you. The lack of control is something companies do NOT like one bit, sales numbers are unimportant in comparison. I can't provide hard data on this, since most of the stuff comes from inside certain companies and market research institutes, so if you want it, you either have to shell out some pretty big pennies (close to 300 per paper) or somehow get that research through other less savoury means. Last edited by chronos02 on Tue Oct 30, 2018 9:48 am; edited 2 times in total |
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Cutiebunny
 Posts: 1747 |
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There should be some way of being able to directly give to the artists without having every licensor take their cut and hoping that a few cents of your purchase actually makes it into the hand of the artist. For example, I hate buying manga from a certain publisher due to their behavior on Twitter and am reluctant to do so unless I actually like the artist's work (as opposed to buying manga because the series sounds interesting). There is currently no way for me to give funds to most of these artists. It is 2018 and there are multiple ways of donating to all sorts of various causes, yet I still can't donate funds to support my favorite mangaka without ending up with a bunch of manga that I'll only ever read once (and supporting distributors I don't like) or some uselsss tchotchkes that just take up space.
I sympathize with those living in countries where importing manga is so expensive due to shipping costs and they can't buy the legal e-versions because the distributor doesn't have the license for that country. There really needs to be an alternative to expecting that foreign fans are going to cough up $20+ just in shipping costs alone for 1 manga volume. |
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Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6867 Location: Kazune City |
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If the major bootleg anime streaming sites had translations in Russian, Hindi, Arabic, or other underserved languages rather than English, the levels of controversy wouldn't be as high.
Last edited by Zalis116 on Tue Oct 30, 2018 2:14 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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chronos02
Posts: 267 |
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You're comparing current tech with tech in the 2000s regarding market research, as well as trust in a relatively new thing such as online fansubs in a market where being "online" was quite rare, not even 6% of the world had access to the internet (right now we're sitting at above 55%), much less enough speed to actually download anything from there, it's no wonder those series tanked, seeing how the users that actually hopped into the fansub bandwagon were very early adopters and could not be considered as part of the general population in analytics, let's not even talk about product sales, even the very same they were downloading, since their tastes were considerably different from the rest of the anime fandom (you could very well call them a niche within a niche). Well, not everyone has the same morals, however, most big aggregator websites, safe for a few ad-infested ones, as well as the main scanlators, will pull the plug on those series, and most users will give up on reading them since there are many other things to read, and they'd usually rather wait for an official release if they do like the titles that have been licenced and thus pulled from their usual reader sites, than having to search for torrents, dubious download websites and new scanlators that pick them up. It's pretty much the same problem that most content providers have: it's not comfortable nor easy to find content that has been licenced, more like, it's a gigantic pain. Obviously not everyone has this mentality of "it's a pain, I'd rather wait and read something else in the meantime", but they are far fewer and less likely to buy given that "must gets for free nows since I'm not gona buy jack". But as always, it's just a percentage of people that think that way even within this "download for free even if it's a gigantic pain in the butt". But hey, I'm just an internet "anon" that knows jack shit about anything even after being a fan of the stuff for more than 20 years and having studied marketing, market research, economics, law, and having been part of the industry. So, yeah, what I said is most likely, around 99.999%, wrong. |
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aereus
Posts: 574 |
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Because licenses aren't negotiated on a per-language basis, they're on a per-country basis and it's less replication of effort for them to go with English for the unlicensed people than two dozen local languages. If Publishers didn't geo-lock all their content, then your argument would hold weight. Specifically in the case of Gangsta: Only a print version is available and overseas volumes are 2-3x the cost of the Japanese. It's also not offered in any other format that might suffice for a preview, like say a magazine. It creates a much higher barrier to entry on people becoming a consumer of your series if their sole source is taking a risk on dropping $10-14 on a volume. Regardless of legality, those who buy manga will buy it, and those who won't aren't likely to be forced into it by restricting access. |
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teferi
Posts: 400 |
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If this was true we wouldn't be talking about piracy in the first place.
Yeah this doesn't even enter the equation. Companies don't sue people downloading their content because it's expensive and bad for business. They came to that conclusion decades ago. In most countries the worst they do is send a C&D to the person uploading it because it's cheaper. There is virtually no risk so the only way to ever make people stop pirating is to make not pirating just as convenient.
Now you're just getting into slippery slope arguments. We wouldn't have sites like CR or Spotify if businesses didn't see value in making their content available for little to nothing.
Because it's easier to find a translator for Japanese to English than it is to find one for Japanese to Arabic. Last edited by teferi on Wed Oct 31, 2018 2:59 am; edited 1 time in total |
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crosswithyou
Posts: 2892 Location: California |
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I agree completely. With regards to the bolded portion, this is how things ought to be, but unfortunately, people are greedy and they will always want more more more. It's hard for people to keep their "wants" in check. I understand that not everything is available translated locally but in an ideal world, people who read scanlations and enjoy the work would at least try to buy the Japanese version to properly pay for what they've consumed. |
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