Just Reading this one Today:

http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2014/07/28/japanese-g overnment-to-start-anti-animemanga-piracy-operation-next-month

wait, did I just read that one sentence correctly?
some 250 titles?

this site alone registered over 34.000 non-hentai titles with at least one release and they want to give us 250? Is this a joke?

It would be great to know which sites they want to shut down though...

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in need of romance?
uncommon, sad, sweet

Update:

See the List of the Website thats on the Anti Anime/Manga Piracy
https://www.batoto.net/forums/topic/19513-japanese-governmen t-to-start-anti-animemanga-piracy-operation-next-month/page-2

I doubt that all these websites are just going to obey them, but good for them for trying to provide an alternative. 250 seems like nothing to most of the people here I'm sure, but it would probably be fine for people who only read the really well-known stuff.

seeing that list, they won't get anything out of it. most of the sites won't even care.
batoto and mangastream are probably the only ones of them who would even read such a request.

I'm interested in how those sites react. and more important, what the government intends to do after everyone ignored their request.

yeah I can already picture those 250 titles... all that incredibly good mainstream stuff... *cough*
that would satisfy the occasional reader at best.

________________
in need of romance?
uncommon, sad, sweet

There is a good chance that we are going to lose quite a few well known titles... damn.

Well, I better stock up fast.

Don't know much about copywright laws, but I doubt they could do anything unless the website was based in Japan and/or founded by a Japanese citizen. Foreign publishing companies with the rights to overseas distribution could petition website providers or their own governments or sue or whatever to have websites taken down, I suppose?

so to sum it up in one word: nothing.
the thing is it's the government right? There should be some consequences for things they declare, I mean that goal is so not possible to achieve they just lose face. And what then?

I remember one incident in my country where they tried to cut down a movie streaming (or streaming collection) website. They succeeded. For exactly one day because some genius added one letter (yes I thought this was a joke at first) to the website url and brought it back. exact same layout. they just copy-pasted everything. Those guys got raided and everything and they just moved out and brought it back. laughed them at the face and nothing since then.

And I suspect the japanese government has and wants to keep the trust of its citizens, so doing this without some kind of plan is like painting a giant bulls-eye onto their behind and saying "laugh at us".

My fear is that it's the scanlators/sublators(?) that will have to pay for that in the end...

________________
in need of romance?
uncommon, sad, sweet

Yeah, exactly the problem. If the US government couldn't stop Wikileaks, I highly doubt that the Japanese government will achieve much success in stopping manga sharing. I remember when I was a kid, a mp3 sharing website (the original Napster) got shut down and there was a big commotion, but those were the very early days of file sharing (and it was a registered business).

Ultimately the key will be providing a viable alternative - something with a hell of a lot more than 250 titles. People will always want free stuff but there will also always be people willing to pay for it, as evidenced by the success of iTunes and Netflix.

I really don't think they will ever manage that though...
you would need permission from every single author/publisher for every single work to compile such a database. and that would still only be japanese language... if works get axed I doubt they will invest any kind of money into the translation, why would they? from their point of view it wouldn't pay off and I really doubt they will get the scanlator/subbing community by saying hey come here, you can translate all you like and we sell that stuff.

it's just so not feasible.

________________
in need of romance?
uncommon, sad, sweet

Isn't this mainly aimed at China and Chinese websites? I thought Japan didn't really care about the Western market?

Well, they have a list with a lot of non japanese or chinese sites, like mangareader, mangastream, I think even batoto is on the list & submanga (which is for spanish readers)

Oh, I'm not implying that all manga should be in there - just licensed manga, to make it affordable on a subscription basis & available in digital form. No one would have a problem with scanlation sites if they only hosted manga that hasn't been licensed in the language it's been scanlated in; who would object to the industry getting some free advertising that it wouldn't have gotten otherwise? The problem is that the sites are hosting licensed material and some even host scans of English publications.

As for the practicality of a database, yah, there might be an issue with gaining approval from authors - it's hard to say. Sign a publishing contract for your novel in North America nowadays and I can almost guarantee there's a clause somewhere in there that says you're signing away the rights to your e-book along with the paper version, so it could be that publishing companies already own the rights to electronic versions of much of the manga licensed in English.

...
......
Youtube?

They list piracy sites, and the first site they list is Youtube?

Well, good luck to them! They tried in the past and managed to get Onemanga to close down. Result? A dozen new sites popped up. If they want the Chinese-operated sites like Mangafox to close down, good luck. They may just succeed. But then the operator will just make a new company and start over, finding someone else as company figurehead owner if necessary.

If they want to compete, they have to do so with superior products, superior speed and superior convenience. Ask Crunchyroll, which has gone legal. It knows. You can 'win' if you give the customers what they want, when they want, how they want. They'll even pay you for it, or at least watch your ads.

The plan wouldn't work.

As already mentioned above, the Japanese Government has no power to ban or shut down mangasite, unless the website is hosted in Japan. For any website hosted outside Japan, Japanese government will need to contact the respective country where the site is being hosted, and wait until the said government relay the massage to the site. Needless to say, most country isn't that big on copyright business, and probably would only gave a warning without any further action. The anti anime/manga piracy operation would mostly affect Japanese uploader, which wouldn't be a problem since most scanlator ship their own raw/ get them from Chinese scanlation. The ban didn't reach torrent and IRC either.

The only thing we need to worry about is 'good natured' site like batoto and baka BT, which probably would 'obey' the law and take down several of their title.