This is the worst kind of mentality to have. The scanlations should be free for everyone so they can share the love of the mangaka's title, not a way to make money on it or limiting to a chosen few. Limiting the access on the internet...why not just stop scanlating since you already know Japanese?

Someone was talking about everything being semi-illegal.
Online mangareaders aren't semi-illegal. They are illegal since they earn money on the mangaka's work. This is the difference between scanlation groups and online mangareaders. Scanlators aren't earning money on someone else's work, online mangareaders are.

About the boycotting deal...
Just quit doing scanlations, it's not worth it anymore when you get disrespected. I've noticed that for the last year I've had to rage 3 times...the 3rd time was enough to make me stop scanlating stuff and closing my group.

I feel sad for the readers but if this is what's in for the rest of my scanlation life then I quit now. After all I've been scanlating for over a decade, I've done my "giving back to the community" deal.

You should remember that there aren't that many translators so scanlation is dying and online mangareaders got a huge part in it. 1 translator leaving means 10 titles dying. Well some may get picked up but not every one of them. This means that some project will always die.

Another thing to remember is....new groups are made by people who don't know squat about scanlations since they think it's damn easy so they start and die very fast, lol.

Last thing to remember is that new translators don't want to do other people's homework but their own, so they aren't that much in for doing old projects but rather new titles, and thus titles die and ends up in the realm of forgotten manga.

It's not me being mean, it's just me telling you about reality. I'm sure many of you know it already and I'm being redundant but for the last week I've met many ignorant people who went: "WHAT MANGAFOX IS EARNING MONEY ON THE MANGAKA'S WORK?!".

i understand that its really frustrating to see someone making money out of your good efforts
but come now, we're on the internet and obviously there are people who dont mind stooping this low to make money
you want your works to reach the readers but you dont want online mangasites to make money out of it
but you cant do anything about those mangasites because they blatantly ignore your requests
so will boycotting change anything?sadly,no
dont get me wrong i really respect people like you who spend hours,days maybe even years to provide scanlations...and btw where i live you can only find really popular mangas in stores(bleach,naruto and onepiece) so my only means of reading manga is from online scanlators
but it cant be helped that sites like mangafox are abusing your rights and the mangakas' rights
theres just nothing we can do about it

Like I said...that's a really depressing thought you got there.

Still you aren't getting it. I'm not angry about them using our scans (well I am a little), I'm angry about them using the mangaka's work to earn money on. It's totally illegal.

Saying there's nothing to do anything about it is the losers' attitude...I don't like to lose. If I did I probably never would have started scanlating stuff.

About you having no access to manga in your country...
I come from a country were only Naruto and One piece is being released...I kinda beat you right? I like One piece so I buy it. Still that's not enough...before tokyopooop went down I had 47 titles that I bought via amazon from the states and paid 2x price to get them here. This doesn't mean that this was enough...lol totally not. I'm a vivid reader of manga so I read the ones I buy, the ones that are scanlated and now the raws...still I know that we need to buy the titles we like otherwise no money to keep the title going in the country it's being made.

About being poor...
If you are poor then go and work. I know that people who buy iphones can buy manga too...I also know that if you are too poor to buy manga then you are doing something wrong in your life. Stop reading manga and go do something productive...really...manga is just making you a loser in this case.

About the nothing we can do attitude...
You can do a lot. You really can. You can start with telling your friends that their favorite online mangareader is earning money on them, they are indirectly causing the scanlating community to die, the manga production in japan to decrease, the mangaka feeling sad and stressed.

I'm not expecting something huge from you, no I just want you to start thinking what you can do to stop supporting those who blatantly screw up with the mangaka by earning money on their stuff. When you think about it you can easily find new ways to bypass it...like instead of using mangafox to read your titles online you can use this one instead: http://www.batoto.com/

So yes, there's a lot YOU can do it (Said in a "I WANT YOU" in uncle Sam manner )

I think boycotting won't be effective. There are thousands of scanlation groups, it will be hard to coordinate them. And I don't think many groups will join. Even if they manage to boycott, it will only hurt scanlators. Lots of people are not scanlators and only using online readers to read their manga. They don't care about policies, all they want is their manga. They will blame the scanlators without thinking, maybe troll and bully scanlators. I've seen many nasty posts like that on MF forum just because scanlators pulled the permission for hosting their scanlations on MF. IMO it will only make the matter worse.

If scanlators want to stop MF/MH, it would be providing better services than them. Batoto is a nice start, IMO. It doesn't compress image, so far easy to use. Moreover, it doesn't making money like MF/MH do. Scanlators must unite, true, but not to boycott or hack online readers.

And maybe in the future, we will have a portal to get manga online legally, just like what happened to music industry. If such thing happened, I think sites like MF/MH will die out eventually.

Anyway, thanks for posting. While I don't agree boycotting, surely having discussion like this helps me more aware about the situation. And I think so does with the rest of us, who usually just leech and read manga freely.

first of all

sorry but what does this have to do with anything?and i dnt remember saying im poor in the previous post :s
i dont get your point here,are u even referring to me?so if u can rephrase it or something because i didnt get your point

and whatever you said after that,
did i say i read manga on mangafox? :s
i do use other websites or sometimes download them...depends on the length
my point was,you cant stop the people incharge of mangafox and other sites from getting the downloads off the net and making money out of them

I took the "poor part" because there will always be someone saying that they are poor after someone say that they don't got access to much manga in their country...so not to explain that part later I took it now. This is in no way attacking you. Well the other part wasn't either. I'm just trying to explain that there are many kinds of paths to choose. Closing our eyes and giving up shouldn't be the one we as mangareaders/scanlators/fans should take.

No, you never did say that you used mangafox but you didn't say that you didn't. Still...you may have some friends that do even if you don't do it, right? Explain it to them because they don't know that this is happening.

...and again you are saying you can't stop them...that's the attitude I don't like the "Giving up"- attitude. Ever thought of what would happen to mangafox or any other site that do it like that if you take away what they are earning money on? They would quitly die. It's not a process that happens from one day to another, it will take time. Probably more time than how long it took mangafox to become that big a community.



I'm sorry to tell you this...there aren't thousands of groups...never was. We should be lucky if there's hundreds of groups active, lol. Plus they are all dying. No staff and lots of new groups, you know.

Any trolling on mangafox...well it stays on mangafox because I don't visit mangafox I don't even care about it.

About the future you are talking about...yep people are talking about it...let's hope something comes out of it. Something good...but it will take time and the efforts of the normal readers too, to move away from bad online readers like mangahere, mangafox, mangareader, goodmanga etcetc. I will pray for it to happen...or to Jmanga.com to start soon and start suing every online mangareader

Last edited by lambchopsil at 8:31 am, Sep 4 2011

Whether online manga readers are good or bad a tough one. Personally I think they are just bad terrible and well insert profanity here. The problem whether they respect the scanlators right or not is in my opinion irrelevant.
Why you ask? Because of the recurring problem with the legality of scanlation. According to my understanding they are illegal, this is mostly based of my own countries laws but also on the basis of multilateral agreements. Mainly the Bern convention and to some extend the TRIPs agreement ( Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Propriety Rights) TRIPs will be used if the scanlators get any economic gain, regardless whether they end up with a loss or not, advertisement, donations etc. Etc. would be economic gain . Every country who have signed these are bound by them and while they are not directly useful they have bound the countries to implement them in the countries legislation. In the Bern Convention it is article 2, 3, 6bis and 8. And after TRIPs it will be after article 3. Hence scanlation is a copyright infringement.
IMO the only reason that the publishers do not come out with guns blazing is because they really do not lose any profit and no one else gain any notable economic gain. And they can basically use us as guinea pigs.
If a series is well received within the small community regarding scanlations there could be a chance that they might consider getting it released overseas.
So when a online reader make big bucks on their copyrighted property they would obviously get pissy.
Bottom line every time you use a online reader you just increase the chance that the publishers might take action.

The sad part is that I can only agree that a boycott would not give any result at all, I think that the only effective way would be for the scanlators to go deeper underground and make it harder for the readers to find, get and use the scanlations. Yeah it sucks big time, but the bigger thorn they get in the publishers eye the more likely we are to get b*** f***** in the end.

And yes my grammar sucks, haven’t spoke proper English for god knows how long, sorry

It is no more legal to freely distribute a copyrighted work (that we aren't going to treat as a single unit like say, giving away a book your purchased. We'll say it's more like translating and printing a bajillion copies of said book) than it is to make money off of it. There's a bigger penalty attached to one of these, but both are illegal. The reason I called it semi-legal is because of the whole nationality issue, with the question being whether or not a Japanese company, or a Japanese government issued copyright, has the right or power to regulate the actions of another country's citizens. As it stands now, it seems that the answer is "not really." The only area where anyone seems to have any authority is in the realm of US licensed mangas, which is why online readers tend to treat them like the plague... well, some of them anyway, like Mangafox... most of the time.

So yes, semi-legal. It's ALL an area of gray caused by the quagmire that is international law and authority.

I hope that clarifies my point at least.

*Edit*

All of this is of course why I always say that I am skeptical as to whether or not a scanlation group can really claim any of their work. While I do feel another entity engaged in something a little shady, like a viewer site, should at least try to respect the scanlation group, seeing as neither of them are really perfectly innocent, I don't maintain the illusion that the scanlators actually hold any real "rights."


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I agree totally. Well except the international law...since the law is the law. It's illegal for both and we both know which one got the bigger penalty.

The reason licensed manga are a plague is that the Americans as they are used to know how to sue someone. The Japanese publishers have been much more nicer in that aspect, something that seems to be changing in the near future.

Thanks for clarifying your point.

To your edit: No group can claim any title. It's the mangaka's and always will be. (oh actually the publishers but you get what I'm saying)
When I hear that groups are claiming the projects as their own and then there are others going "We will do it too" I find it sad. First the group can't claim it. Second why is there a second group doing the same title? It's just waste of resources

So scanlators hold no "rights" to anything. I don't think the convo was about scanlators right...more like the mangaka's rights. If I did, then I apologize and pull it back because it goes against my view on scanlations that scanlators got "rights" on someone else's work.

Edit: Wait, I just wanna know. Did you say that earning on the mangaka's work was semi-illegal? Because then you kinda said that if there's a country that got patent on something in usa then it's fine for someone in europe to earn money this patent without giving shit to the dude in usa...I think you didn't but I just got confused... O.o

Boycott will fail. It won't even start, because most scanlators either don't care or are too timid to do anything that could be effective (although they rationalize it with "we can't do anything anyway").

Incidentally, I don't know if there's a precedent or not, but based on my understanding of copyright laws, online manga readers are in fact stealing from scanlators, more specifically, the translators. The copyright on anything you write automatically belongs to you. Therefore, all scanlations contain copyrighted translations. Translators have the legal right to dictate how their work is distributed. Now, because these translations are unauthorized, the original publisher can potentially take away the copyright, but only IF THEY CHOOSE TO DO SO. If they don't, the translator retains the ownership of the copyright, and online manga readers are legally bound to abide by their wishes. Which they don't, of course.

Well, it would be interesting if anyone with a better knowledge of IP law could comment on this.

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While my previous post regarding the legality of scanlation was ignored I can't help it, gotta respond to the copyright issue concerning the translations.
Joy o joy we do it on the go
To start of properly is a translation protected at all? After the Bern Convention, which almost every country is a part of a translation is copyright protected see the convention article 2, § 3. This means that a translation will be protected as well as a totally original work. But according to article 8 it is the author that has the exclusive right to make or authorize the translation of a his or hers work. This basically means that while a translation by itself enjoy copyright protection, these rights have to be exercised with respect to the original authors rights. Obviously the scanlators do not have the permession of the author, creator, mangaka, whatever you want to call them hence they are violationg the authors rights.
The result will be that while a translation from group theoretically do enjoy copyright protection the rights they are given will be a useless right as they can not exercise their rights with respect for the original creators rights, they do not have the permission to translate the work in the first place. This means that while they theoretically have some sort of copyright protection, they can not enforce the protection as they have violated the creators rights in the first place and it will be impossible for them to exercise their rights with the respect of the creators rights. It is not necessary for the creator to take any action with regards to the scanlators rights as their rights will depend on the author.
Basically they can do nothing.

finally, someone posts actual laws. but a couple of corrections. there is no law prohibiting the translation of of any work. and because the translation is your work you may distribute it so long as the original author, or copyright holder is cited, ie otherwise you'll be plagiarizing.(if one does do this the copyright holder's lawyer will find something to sue you on, and you'll most likely settle, but it in itself is not illegal). Thus scanlators can distribute their translations without the pictures or anything else and it would be legal.
for example i believe the vn Osananajimi wa Daitouryou was being translated, got licensed by alcot and then in turn bought the translation from the fansubbers.

So in short, a translator can't enforce his copyright without a direct authorization from the copyright holder in the original language? Incidentally, copyright holder (i.e. publisher) or author?

But oh well, there goes one nice theory.

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You've raised an interesting point about IP law hehe - patents are actually a completely different area, and aren't enforceable internationally. So yes, if you have a patent on sth in the usa then someone can earn money on it in europe. That's why big companies will normally apply simultaneously for patents across all the major jurisdictions. What that person in europe can't do though is make any money out of the product in the usa (where the patent is held) - eg. you can't just produce the patented product outside the usa and then ship it back in to sell.

After that small sidenote though, what I think TheShawn meant by semi-illegal is that there is a question over who enforces copyright (which is enforceable internationally thanks to Bern, TRIPS etc previously mentioned in this thread). Eg whether a Japanese company could enforce their copyright over American citizens. I would disagree with the "not really" answer though - I think this sort of international enforcement is already occurring outside of the manga/scanlation area. Just recently in Australia (where I live) there has been a series of cases involving ISPs being sued by both Australian and American companies for movie piracy [several of these were unsuccessful, but not on the ground that American companies can't sue]. I would say all that is required for the Japanese companies to sue in America is US legislation saying that international copyright can't be infringed (and as they're a signatory to all these conventions etc I'm sure it would be there in their copyright leg.).

Ah, the term I keep using, semi-illegal, is by no means the best descriptor of the situation. I use the term, very much incorrectly as there really is no "sort of" in the law, because of the status of international enforcement of laws. What I mean is, because no real action has ever been taken by any Japanese entities towards scanlations, at least overseas, the actions of the scanlators, while illegal, are not punished... and if something is illegal but unpunished, is it really illegal? The same idea applies here in the US to older laws... like you can't carry ice cream in your pockets and such things as that. Without enforcement of the rules, the whole thing becomes a big gray swamp of miscommunications.

So no, I don't feel people have the right to profit from another person's patents, or copyrights, or trademarks, (well, that's just fact) but if nothing is ever done about it and they can't be enforced... well, you see where I'm going. Now the question of AUTHORITY to enforce the rules is another matter. If Japanese companies could establish, and did exercise, this right, then the whole argument is utterly resolved.

I don't discuss the actual legality of it (as has been pointed out translation of a work when authorized, which scanlations aren't, and contain copyrighted images to boot, is a completely unique entity of itself), only the state of things as it stands right now.

Edit*

Others, like autumnstarshine, have already addressed other factors of my own argument (mind readers) which is why I add only this bit. I hope it helps. I tend to lose even myself in the kerfuffle that is my on-the-fly writing style.


Last edited by TheShawn at 7:52 pm, Sep 7 2011

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