Quote from Jigero
You know here I was thinking Scanlators did their thing because they liked it and felt like being good Samaritans to help out other fans. But nope I guess all they care about in meager internet notoriety and bitching about sites that make money though processes that neither effect them nor their fans in anyway at all. Oh that's right you're only bitching about the money they're making because you're not making that money, Even though it's illegal....
So how do you combat this? You impose draconian rules, sink to childish threats, use annoying water marks, or force users to jump through hoops to get your releases. Which is all well and good, until you realize. All this does is piss off your loyal fans and have no affect on the people who break your rules and dodge your hoops (who are in the minority by the way and just will do it more out of spite.)
But I'll let you in on a little secret and it's sure fire way to avoid all this drama and is goes a little some thing like this " WHO GIVES A FLYING FUCK!?" your doing this because your doing it for the fans right? so why the hell should you give a crap how fans enjoy your material, if's it's not hurting you or your fans in any way WHO CARES.
It's like giving a bum a dollar then getting pissed at how he spends the dollar. If you're getting all pissy at how fans are enjoying your work you're doing this for all the wrong reasons.
But, you know, it's really annoying when you work really hard to produce a scanlation, spend your time to make it perfect, while you could play games or do something else, and then someone just takes the product of your hard work and posts it on a site like mangafox, without even bothering to ask if they could do it, and often claims that it's they who did the scanlation, which is simply unfair. And people praise mangafox, saying that it's such a great site, there's so much manga there, while it's not mangafox who spends money and effort to give the manga to them.
To use your metaphor, it's as if you gave a bum a dollar, and there came another guy claiming that he was the one who did it and everyone started praising him and giving him money, while you are the one who is one dollar shorter, but nobody cares.
Scanlators are people too, and if they don't receive any financial profit from they work, they need at least appreciation, but they often don't get even this. I'm really happy that mangaupdates exists because this way I can easily find the scanlators' websites and thank them for their hard work directly.
