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This is quite a neverending discussion topic, heated war in scanlation world, if you're following.
This is the latest hot topic at MangaUpdates since a while ago. It's talking about how an old manga scanlation group closed down because of a specific online manga reader didn't respect her wish not to host her scans. Nothing special? Yeah, nothing if the group is not a group as old as 11 years. Yeah, they have been scanning since 2002, I was still a crybaby.
The situation is nothing new. Our relationship with online manga readers/manga aggregators have always been like that. The same point from all of us is that we are doing something illegal. The scanlation groups are scanning and translating many mangaka's works without permission. And the online readers hosted them, acting as a database. The only difference I noticed so far is the fact that these readers got an income, while scanlators didn't. Even if we did ask for donations, it would be for buying raws and do yet another illegal work. And all these illegal things were born from our love and passion towards manga. We didn't get anything except the happiness and satisfaction of telling others that there are amazing titles you need to check out. While I have no idea of a specific online manga reader's income is enough as a job to feed someone on, I don't care and I don't want to know either; the fact that he and friends gained money by hosting our works (meaningwe do the works, not he and friends is what I have a hard time accepting.
We are often called hypocrites. Probably we are. No, indeed we are. As I said, we're all doing illegal works here, we're going against copyright. So why are we still doing this? If you're often into manga world, you know what we say as "an effort to make less popular manga widely known to the world". From my current manga reading list, almost all of them I never saw published in my country, and probably never will. How much more out there, only God knows maybe. That's just one me. What about billions of other readers living at other countries but Japan? Who can't read Japanese? Who can't buy things online?
We are hypocrites. Whatever, I don't care. While I do feel bad for the mangaka, I'm not gaining any profit from doing this. Neither did readers/visitors who visit scanlators' website or the online readers. Heck, in fact we lose more than we gain. At least we stop scanlating when the series is licensed to be released internationally. At least we remove all those files when license comes around. Unlike some other bunch.
Inside Scanlation, a website dedicating itself to the history and development of manga scanlation world, wrote that some series and mangaka gained popularity because of online scanlations. I have no idea if that is true or not. And I have no idea if we're actually helping mangaka spreading their works too. I do believe it has an impact, a balance between positive and negative, because you can't achieve perfection of good things only in this world.
So I'll keep on going, until the day I'm too fed up with this to continue.
This is the latest hot topic at MangaUpdates since a while ago. It's talking about how an old manga scanlation group closed down because of a specific online manga reader didn't respect her wish not to host her scans. Nothing special? Yeah, nothing if the group is not a group as old as 11 years. Yeah, they have been scanning since 2002, I was still a crybaby.
The situation is nothing new. Our relationship with online manga readers/manga aggregators have always been like that. The same point from all of us is that we are doing something illegal. The scanlation groups are scanning and translating many mangaka's works without permission. And the online readers hosted them, acting as a database. The only difference I noticed so far is the fact that these readers got an income, while scanlators didn't. Even if we did ask for donations, it would be for buying raws and do yet another illegal work. And all these illegal things were born from our love and passion towards manga. We didn't get anything except the happiness and satisfaction of telling others that there are amazing titles you need to check out. While I have no idea of a specific online manga reader's income is enough as a job to feed someone on, I don't care and I don't want to know either; the fact that he and friends gained money by hosting our works (meaning
We are often called hypocrites. Probably we are. No, indeed we are. As I said, we're all doing illegal works here, we're going against copyright. So why are we still doing this? If you're often into manga world, you know what we say as "an effort to make less popular manga widely known to the world". From my current manga reading list, almost all of them I never saw published in my country, and probably never will. How much more out there, only God knows maybe. That's just one me. What about billions of other readers living at other countries but Japan? Who can't read Japanese? Who can't buy things online?
We are hypocrites. Whatever, I don't care. While I do feel bad for the mangaka, I'm not gaining any profit from doing this. Neither did readers/visitors who visit scanlators' website or the online readers. Heck, in fact we lose more than we gain. At least we stop scanlating when the series is licensed to be released internationally. At least we remove all those files when license comes around. Unlike some other bunch.
Inside Scanlation, a website dedicating itself to the history and development of manga scanlation world, wrote that some series and mangaka gained popularity because of online scanlations. I have no idea if that is true or not. And I have no idea if we're actually helping mangaka spreading their works too. I do believe it has an impact, a balance between positive and negative, because you can't achieve perfection of good things only in this world.
So I'll keep on going, until the day I'm too fed up with this to continue.