I'm aware of groups that release scans of licenced material. I downloaded Maison Ikkoku which has the Viz covers, pretty obvious that it's from Viz, I got no problem with that, sort of. But the group I have in mind used the Japanese cover scan rather than the English one, and there is no clear indication that it's scans from Viz (except for a small ShoujoBeat logo on one page). They don't credit themselves with the translation though, only editing, QC and scanning. I just hope that in future, this group makes it clear when they use scans from an official release.

That's odd that the person/group doesn't credit them for translating, but credits them for everything else including scanning (even though this person/group is scanning their work XD). I guess it wasn't possibly just a mistake that they left them off as translator. And that's odd that the person/group would go to the trouble of finding the Japanese version of the cover instead of using the one from that book that she/he/them is scanning from. They either looked all over the internet or found and maybe even bought the Japanese vol(s) to scan in the cover. The search for the Japanese cover is a lot of work on top of just scanning and maybe checking that the scan is good as I see it. Then again, maybe the person/group doesn't like how some publishers alter the manga covers.

[color=#990066]My avatar was Yves Saint Laurent's The Black Evening Dress (with big bow) first shown in 1983, photographed from his 2002 retrospective and final show.[/color] [color=#CC0066]Check out some of his collections for free (pre-2008) HERE[/color] [color=#CC0066]courtesy of FirstView[/color].

Honestly I would prefer that people do not scan in direct, say, Viz releases. I personally think that is very unethical. I can see people going to the trouble of scanning/translating the manga themselves, but just direct copying? What's the point. We currently list those here for two reasons, one because it's hard to check every release to make sure it's not a direct scan, and two, because that would require discrimination, and we try not to discriminate what information people choose to report.

Well there are many shades of gray in the manga scanslation world (and anime too). After all, it's not really considered okay to scanslate manga that has been licensed because that discourages people to buy the book format. I read about a year ago from the guy that runs Snoopyscool doesn't like that group A started a project and does it up to chapter 10 and then group B picks up the project and just decides to release from chapter 11 on. From what I understand, he was mad because it was wasting resources, and that it's also taking the fan following away from one group. The ice just gets keeping thinner and thinner.

Though for people that scan straight from the published and translated copies, it really surprised me when I first saw it done by TFT. Because to me it was 1) super risky and 2) I was surprised that they scanned it at this super high quality.. It blew my mind. I suppose it's their time and their manga volumes, well excluding whose published property they had bought a piece of. ^^

[color=#990066]My avatar was Yves Saint Laurent's The Black Evening Dress (with big bow) first shown in 1983, photographed from his 2002 retrospective and final show.[/color] [color=#CC0066]Check out some of his collections for free (pre-2008) HERE[/color] [color=#CC0066]courtesy of FirstView[/color].

Not everybody lives in USA. For some of us, the only way to accessing most mangas is fansubbing and therefore Scans from the companies that edits and translates mangas. Yeah its illegal, but well, all the fansub enviroment is illegal in some way, but to us its the only way.

aye... and that's exactly why we're here.