Jesus fucking Christ.

Itallcomestumblingdown.flac

What a great host! Wikipedia would love to have your host.
Sarcasm aside, a host and domain outside the US would be most favorable for you it seems considering the events in the past year.
Truth be told though, the ones sending these DMCAs know as much about copyright and fair use as "Wikipedia is a safe harbor for pirates"-people. Even the DMCA for links last year was illegal.

I was wondering about that. Kinda strange to not allow cover art (in most cases, less than half of the cover art at that).

This is just dumb, dmca because the cover? Do they sell manga in bags? or wrapped in something to hide the covers? LOL no one would buy them if they didn't see the covers.

Now that is just fucking sad. Seen as it isn't all that difficult to figure out which companies were behind this, their stock just went down a bunch in my books.

A really good way to increase my inclination to buy your products.... oh, wait.

Not sure if your host is the same as your domain registrar, but I've heard some pretty horrible stories about GoDaddy, especially in regards to DMCAs. They'll pretty much always screw you over and never investigate anything (stuff like people making bogus DMCA claims against competitors who use GoDaddy).

I don't care what Kodansha says, it's fair use. Otherwise, Wikipedia would never be able to put up cover images of albums or anything like that. Over the years, I've grown to dislike Kodansha. I hate how they dominate the market and refuse to get with the times because it threatens their monopoly.

(P.S. @lambchop The link to the thread identifying "a certain publisher" is broken.)

So. the only thing that is neither publicly available information or user-written are the publicly available covers so they get attacked... Really...

First time I've seen publishers dumb enough to censor their OWN promotional pictures, because what else are covers?

Thanks for the news!

more attacks from crunchyroll and horrible to shut down everyone

DMCA'd again? For fuck's sake! Go fuck yourself, Crunchyroll and Kodansha. I understood the legal issues surrounding the removal of scanlator groups but this is insane, this is unarguably fair use of the covers.

Take a look at Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nanatsu_no_Taizai_Volume_1.png

They host the same content, and even they consider it fair use:

From the "Licensing" section of that page:

This image is of book cover(s), and the copyright for it is most likely owned either by the artist who created the cover(s) or the publisher of the book(s). It is believed that the use of low-resolution images of book covers

- to illustrate an article discussing the book in question
- on the English-language Wikipedia, hosted on servers in the United States by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation,

qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law. Other use of this image, on Wikipedia or elsewhere, might be copyright infringement. See Wikipedia:Non-free content for more information.

MU operates under the same conditions, therefore the same rules apply to them. Fight back MU, don't let them reduce you to uselessness!

I understood when download links were removed. I could sort of understand when links to scanlation groups were removed as well. But covers? The Japanese seem to be rather strict when it comes to image copyright (at least I think so, considering that most anime/manga related articles on Japanese wikipedia have no images at all), but nobody would seriously think that images on the site could cause losses to the publisher. And contacting your host behind your back was a really rude thing to do. And the host is no better.
It's annoying that a useful site like MU that doesn't publish anything illegal is constantly harassed with ridiculous DMCA requests, while online manga aggregator sites continue to prosper without any problems.

I don't understand the commotion.
What's the big deal?
MU has been dead ever since the links were removed.
And seriously, who needs covers anyway??
Just go to your friendly local online reader and you're set.

Awwww so even databases can be hit by DMCA requests, lol. That's a new one but the world is funny enough already so it doesn't surprise me much.

Kinda sux but from a strategic point of view I would get mangaupdates closed to. After all, it contains all the information about what has been scanlated and what is being scanlated each day. So if it was me I would use every option to do something about mu so I could illegal scanlations. (I'm sure people won't argue about this anymore...if they want to then they should read the law about this. We had this discussion a trillion times in the past already) So if I get mu removed then the online readers will have a hard time to find stuff to put up on their readers and the readers will also be forced to visit every group's site they like to get their manga. Not to mention they will be forced to keep their eyes and ears for new groups popping up and doing their manga. This will require efforts from their side and many will stop reading manga because it's not worth their time to put this much effort into it. So brilliant strategy if they can carry it out.

I don't get why people start screaming about kodansha or other publishes on this thread. What will that affect? The publishers aren't even reading what you are writing. Send them mails or something so they can hear your opinion being voiced. If you are just using this thread as a stress relief then carry on and I apologize for my lack of understanding.

I agree with the others; it's under law fair use to have covers and single pages of a work posted on your site. It makes no sense that they can have the covers removed.

Partial(?) List of Removed Covers

Apocalypse no Toride
Coppelion
Fairy Tail
Kami-sama no Iutoori Ni
Kimi no Iru Machi
Nanatsu no Taizai
Nazo no Kanojo X
Shingeki no Kyojin
Uchuu Kyoudai
UQ Holder!
Wagatsuma-san wa Ore no Yome
Yamada-kun to 7-nin no Majo

One guess as to what all these titles have in common...

That's right they're all done by Crunchyroll. Not only that, they're Crunchyroll's big series. You can almost imagine the desperation of whoever runs it screaming "Damn Manga Databases, They're stealing my money!"

For real cover art. Amazon should be getting a lot of DMCA then...

Are publisher getting that possessive or their material. I thought cover art are mean to be display?

Server outside US is your safest bet, US copyright laws are getting manipulated every second by dumb publishers

Maybe you shouldn't announce CR releases, i think they were offended by that.

I can understand why the links to groups had to be removed, but this is ridiculous. I, for one, will not start a manga without looking at the cover art; the art style is a very important factor for me. I'm not going to look up the images.... Especially if/when there are so many. If I'm not reading the manga inline, this destroys any chance of me actually buying the manga. Also, shouldn't Wikipedia have tons of DMCA notices per day?? @.@ same with all the online readers....
Good move, publisher.

Could people that are saying this site is dead or should be shut down please either leave or drop dead? If that's your opinion, stop coming back...

On that strategic pov: most aggregator sites already have a new chapter before it is listed here, so taking down mu has no effect whatsoever on those. Tbh what would you as publisher prefer? People get information about manga from aggregator sites where they could just read it for free, or from mu that doesn't offer that service?

They can't touch the aggregators, so they piss off one of the few places with people that don't only care about releases and reading (licensed) manga. The only thing they are doing is driving people to those sites they can't do sh** about...

Maybe it helps to switch domainnames the .com domain that mangaupdates is using is actually for commercial site, most people wouldn't even know it's a non-profit site. But it's the worst option for hosting possible licensed material. you don't have any protection with a .com domain. I would also recommend to use another country for hosting the database.
Anyway google hosts way more manga related material. (When you search some manga with the picture search, a lot of manga pictures shows up. All those miniature examples are hosted by google (someone told this to me). And wikipedia hosts more pictures anyway than MU.

This is probably a collective act by publishers who wish to prevent manga distribution at the "source", and they believe that MangaUpdates is one of the biggest locations performing said distribution.

They (the publishers) probably allude MU to websites like file sharing forums or websites that, although they may not necessarily host the files directly, they provide possible locations for where readers may access the series in question. (Content owners are usually unable to shut down those sorts of websites due to them being located in some archaic part of the world, so they simply go to the file hosts and request for the files to be taken down instead.)

They likely justify targeting websites like MU as opposed to other "ordinary" information websites as they likely believe places like MU are seeking hits, and that technically does not serve in their own profitable interests.

Since the last few years, there have been other websites "rising" while MU is "falling", to continue this stream of release information, including but not limited to other "release information" websites as well as online reader websites themselves.

I'll state that, in today's society, piracy will keep going strong ("scanlation" is technically piracy). And as we all know how piracy goes, authorities will try to stop it, but they cannot stop people from continuing to do it (unless those who own the website are arrested and fined or jailed for whatever grounds).

But yes, now that MangaUpdates is building a reputation for being easily targeted by publishers, others will likely join suit. We will have to see what happens, both here, and at other websites.

Well, Baka-updates kinda fuck themselves over with using in the "About Us" section writing
Content Rights
MangaUpdates does not own or imply ownership of any of the images used on the site. All images belong to their respective owners

Instead of saying the cover pictures are under fair usage law. What you have now is enough for publishers to force a takedown, you should change wording here asap!

Please dont pussy out and give them what they want with out a fight.. Pretty sure this falls under fair use.. If you give in to this.. whats going to happen next? They will send you DMCA's because you have the names of certain series listen on your site..

If they did it without following the proper law-prescribed procedures, doesn't this mean that they have illegally breached their contract with you?

For COVERS? seriously? That's childish.

I hope you are negotiating with host for free hosting (x time) to stop you from litigating more serious penalties. (No clue where host is based though, but if American it should be easy right?)

WOW THAT SUCKS!!, those people must be extremely stupid for calling copyrights for covers, then why not sue google? you can get almost every cover and image you want... this is beyond stupid. here im MU you can read about a serie and when looking at the cover art you can decide if read it or not. If this site close down, mark my words thati those people that buy manga will GO DOWN the hill...

Would love to see one of these guys trying to sue Google I bet they'd loose and get fined for wasting the time of Google employees.

Good Luck on the host search and make sure the next host has something like this in the contract: "In case of copyright infringement we will inform you and give you x hours to correct the problems"

>someone send DMCA
>MU complying
>someone other send DMCA
>MU complying
>someone else send DMCA
>MU complying
>some hobo from street send DMCA
>MU complying and ask for more

I see a clear pattern here. S&M as it is.

Jesus, the people who run this site have no backbone. A single image isn't copyright violation. If you would bother doing even a LITTLE research about fair use, you'd see you're in the right. Or maybe, just maybe, try calling an attorney who specializes in these cases and ask for a free consultation.

"the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright."

That's a except from this site: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/copyright-fair-use-and-how -it-works-for-online-images/

Seriously, lambchopsil, do you only use your time to peruse the forums? It's like you expect the members here to do all the work for you.

Sweden, Netherlands and Iran
this countries are our last hope

In Sweden, TeliaSonera ISP dont give a shit about DMCA

How save is the future of this website and what would need to be changed to make it last ?

You must be kidding me. Covers are everywhere! Databases, reviews, wikis, shops... This is just idiotic. They might as well take down the internet!

Hopefully this gets solved. Who doesn't judge a book by the cover?

Mangaupdates should look for a hosting provider in a civilized country, remaining in the Wildling territory known as the US is getting too costly now.

Man...that's Sick...

First 'The two companies', who sent those notice, really did things that doesn't make any sense...

Second, The Host, who disabled the ip without a notice don't know what "Customer Satisfaction" means, they're totally unsafe, they may even leak precious data given the situation without prior warning...

They're Not A Bit Trustworthy...Hope We'll Be Able To Se MangaUpdates With A Good Host Soon Enough^^