WARNING: Very long post ahead.
Quote from PoCHa
But his concept of having fast http downloads is what most people are looking for (to not say everyone, because someone can come in and say he's not and it will mess up with my premise). A lot of people don't know how to use IRC, torrent and some of them don't want to know how to use it (too much of a hassle it seems). They would rather pay (let say) 10$ per month instead of taking an hour or two to learn, meaning that the effort of learning worths more than 10$ per month. Thus, they turn to site like his.
Of course they could go to free sites like Evil Empire and Manga Uploads, which offers http on uploading sites. But hey, he offers the same thing plus downloads to anime (and jdrama too i think.. was gonna search, but got lazy..). So for 10$ per month, no need to search all over, go to different channels (which I know you already don't have to for manga releases thanks to lurk), wishing there are seeders left if you haven't dled it when it came out, etc.
So, basically, his concept is to make what you want available when you want it. Which is something most people want. He's giving out this accessibility. However, this accessibility comes with the 10$ per month price. If they rather pay it, who cares right? And I don't think this is to be called as "stupid".
The main thing I don't like about his concept (which is more than likely linked to his person) is that he's not respecting the groups that he's "stealing" from without giving proper credits and more highly probable without their consents. He's not giving back to the groups he took the things from. If he was to give back a certain percentage of the money by donation, it would more acceptable. If his intentions would have stayed to make releases more easily available to the people and not be making profit out of it, it would be okay. But instead, he goes buy himself (for his personal use) expensive electronics with the money (as I heard)...
I guess you could compare this to big coffee companies, paying pennies to the people working in the coffee plants field, but we ain't receiving anything, even pennies. :/
Yeah... long post, just my thoughts.... bet no one is gonna read it anyways.. <_<
>_>
And ares6, do you know which province he is from in Canada? If you can get his real name, it would be possible to call up the some provincial attorney association or something to see if he's a member there.
Well the thing is, even though I go "why do I have to pay to use this?" (It maybe due to the skeptical or cheap part in me) when I hear about p2p programs that want me to sign up, there are enough people going "$10...meh, I'll pay it". In the USA, $10 = 1 volume of manga.
And it's not like the coffee companies exactly. Tazmo's stuff seems more like piracy since it's not like Tazmo is the boss of all the groups that scanslate the manga or even the fansubs that you mention. But then in terms of "piracy" the fansubbing and scanslation group wouldn't be totally innocent because of copyright laws...
Maybe he doesn't even bother pretending to respect the scanslation/fansub groups because it would be too much trouble? Since he's profiting from them, I doubt he'd please all of them since then he would have to make zero profit (scanslations are not to be for profit) so it might be easier to not try to please any of them. He's not running for president, so...
Quote from Da-manta-ray
well, I have heard about a place where some guy wants you to pay for scanlations... and what he's doing is wrong...
But if you're dumb enough to get sucked into that stuff in the first place...well, I dunno. I think that paying $10 a month to be lazy and not find the stuff/learn how to use IRC or bittorrent is stupid. And there are other sites you can direct download/read online for free. and it really doesn't take that long to learn IRC or bittorrent. Many scanlation sites have how-tos on their webpage, it's not that hard to learn.
But if you want to pay, be my guest. whatever
Well I guess to the the people that paid $10 it doesn't really seem like that much and they would rather be lazy looking for manga than to spend the time looking for manga. Manga can be sometimes easy to find and sometimes not, and it can be very much the latter if one doesn't know where to look. Maybe it's the ones wanting instant gratification that are paying $10 to Tazmo.
Quote from phanzanu
Quote from Da-manta-ray
But if you want to pay, be my guest. whatever
Never ever say that. Scanlations by fans for fans are NEVER for sale. Even if scanlators spread manga in other languages, they never (are supposed to) ask for payment because it is downright wrong. And it's worse if you profit from it when you're not the one doing any actual scanlating work.
Even if you're saying that to those "stupid" people (so that they stay "stupid"), please, just don't.
Well once a scanslation/fansub group asks for payment then it probably leaves them open to a lawsuit, even if the stuff isn't licensed...
Quote from sakimichi
I did heard from stoptazmo.com that he is the owner of NF and has a "premium membership" area where he let's users pay for the http/direct downlaods of anime episodes and manga. What's worse is that he's selling fansubs from fansubbers and manga from freelance scanlators which is a foul play.
It's really unfair for fansubbers and scanlators since they get nothing from their works while that guy is enjoying the money he got from the fans. That's why nowadays, fansubbers inserts on anime episodes "If you payed for this then you got ripped off" an some of the scanlators inserts it on their edited manga.
A lesson for the fans: Never buy scanlated manga/fan subbed series cause they are free period.
Actually, when fansubbing started up I believe the "If you payed for this then you got ripped off" was put in there because there would be people that would profit off of the fansub made by someone else. I think it's been there all the time. When Karen Duffy, who helped fansubbed Fushigi Yuugi under Tomodachi Anime found out that people were profitting from the fansubs, she said that she would stop subbing the anime at about episode 30-something and so people were, I guess, "annoyed" that she quit because of this. She even put in the subs that the fansubs were not to be for sale but I guess she took the piracy too personally. (She did eventually finish subbing it after another group decided they wanted to complete the subbing and I guess she decided to finish her subbing for some reason.) I remember people questioning how "at cost" those fansubs were at $20 a tape too...
Quote from PoCHa
I think the paying members of his site are rather ignorant than stupid. If they knew how much his servers and everything is costing him VS how much he's receiving from them in total, there would be some questions asked. However, people are usually lazy by nature and would cope with whatever (if the price isn't too high).
And I think if he's paying, let's say, 500$ per month for making the manga/anime/jdrama releases more easily available for the fans (cost of servers and such), why not ask the ones using his service to pay their part in it ne? I'm talking about paying for the distribution and not the scanlation/fansubbing.
The problem with his site is that the repartition of the total cost isn't quite well done, because the total of money he gets back is higher than what the servers and everything is costing him. There should be some economy of scale when more people join until the fixed costs are changed (ex: need to add servers, upgrade connection, etc.). But instead he's not lowering the price and making/increasing his profit.............
Well I think it's fair to think that Tazmo isn't getting and hosting the manga for his own health, or even just his own ego.
If he gets into trouble for distribution, which I don't think he necessarily will because p2p programs are able to get around it (despite the RIAA and the movie companies so wanting to own their butts), then don't we and all scanlators have to start watching our backs?
I'm guess Tazmo is probably selfish and probably doesn't care about other people feeling bad and he would rather have the money as his friend. Well, this is just how I "feel" it is.
Tazmo might just represent those people that take scanslated manga or fansubbed anime, put it on a CD and then sell it on eBay for a profit.
And I have pictures of how a group "marked" a scanslated manga chapter I read. It isn't just their logo in a corner in some white space but it's over the middle of the page and such, so I think it might have been due to Tazmo or something like him as to why they felt the need to put their logo on 18 of the 34 pages in the chapter. I'll put it in another post after someone else posts since my post is already painfully long as it is. >_>
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