Piracy, Services (and Hentai)

[size=24]PREFACE: This is not about the ethics of piracy. Please leave that discussion for another thread.
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I'm also assuming most of you have seen GabeN explain his view of piracy.

I've been thinking about this for some time now. With FAKKU going clean piracy of their works will of course inflate. Most users want to view hentai without paying any fees. Most people don't want to spend extra time fussing over anything. They just want to fap or whatever. Get the goods, get it done, move on with life. Whatever's easy, whatever is best. I think that piracy becomes the optimal choice for a consumer when s/he has to jump through fewer hoops to get what they want than by other means.

So what are the options? FAKKU of course has a pretty solid service. Get your self an account, get subscribed (or purchase a book) and enjoy your fap fuel. Now that there's less traffic, we get fewer interruptions and load times are generally good. Also there are no advertisements for customers, yay! I think that's all not bad.

Now let's examine the alternatives.

Download & Save a pirated copy to your disk is one. I won't name the sources, you can find them yourself if you so desire. This is pretty straightforward. You find a source, you download, and then enjoy. However in most cases you must download what you want in full before you're able to view everything the way it was intended.

Rehosted copies is another option. This might even be more straightforward than downloading. You just have to find a piracy hub and view the material in basically the same as you would nHentai or ex. You can even find it on certain social media hubs. The only thing in your way here are invasive advertisements (that are easily blocked).

I think piracy has fewer hoops here. You have to open your wallet and enter personal information to get through FAKKU's system. You have to log into FAKKU every single day you want to visit this site (I'm sorry but as trivial as this is, it does still annoy people). If you just activate your subscription you might have to wait for it to kick in. Piracy looks easier in this case. And I think at best FAKKU trades blows with the piracy options.

I'd also like to examine other cases of piracy. When I was younger I would pirate PC games (who didn't?) but wow it was a nightmare. I'm pretty sure I downloaded malware more than a few times and fucked up the family computer more times than I can remember. Additionally you had to find suspicious software (like cracks) or go searching the net for valid CD Keys. I had to go looking for torrents or fishy ass warez sites. In most cases it was more trouble than it was worth. But I had no money, so there weren't alternative options. As soon as I got myself Steam, I never cared to pirate games again. Once I had money, it was just buy, download and play. No need to worry about most other shit. A clear win for using a paid service.

Anime is (or maybe was) a pretty good example I think. Without official services sometimes your options are questionable at best. You get shitty mirrors, varying levels of quality, annoying ads, stuttery playback, and broken players (well.. Crunchyroll's player isn't much better). I don't have to mess with any of that if I choose the right service. And for me Crunchy does a good enough job that I don't have to care about anything else. Same with (some) movies. Netflix is king when it comes to putting on a random flick.

But stuff like manga and music probably don't fare as well. I think the type of media might play a role in this. You can pirate music right off of youtube if you know how, which doesn't require jumping through many hoops at all. Manga aggregators are more numerous than their legitimate counterparts. And I think manga suffers from the same exact problems that FAKKU does. It's just so easy to get One Piece off your favorite piracy hub. There's another thing I thought about and it's how the media is consumed. Something like music is repeatedly used over an indefinite period of time. We all have our favorites. Stuff we consider to be timeless. That's not so for manga. A lot of manga is only consumed once by anyone. After pirating manga there's very little incentive to turn around and actually purchase it. Owning a physical copy is one possible incentive, but there's just not much beyond that. And I think maybe buying into a subscription helps add value over time. But that too is subject to piracy. It's a difficult problem.

I think we're getting really good at this piracy thing. I mean I just looked at a certain anime site and holy shit that site is actually really usable. It's basically an illegitimate business in a lot of cases, especially with manga aggregation sites. So what is the solution here? Is piracy just the ultimate fate for certain media? Discuss.

Also DRM Is a thing I didn't really cover but I don't think it's really necessary to discuss that at length. It's just another obstacle.

I think that the effort involved in obtaining said materials is more important than ease of using those materials in cases of piracy.

Saying piracy is a service problem is attacking a small aspect of why it happens in the first place. Having a piracy hub of some sorts that functions well as a website is of course an optimal experience, but pervasive ads and persistent popups are things people who view pirated materials have learned to live with. In fact, it's become something of an immunity to them, so much so that the idea of "no ads" doesn't do much to make a service more appealing to them.

As it stands, the fact of the matter is that people don't want to spend their money. You can try an make it a moral dilemma and claim these people don't care about authors, but at the end of the day piracy in its purest form relies not on ease of use, but on the ease of obtaining. It is far easier to just run on over to hitomi, where every fetish in every language is fully presented to you and allows for heavily specified filtered searching. Seeing as the alternative is to make an account, punch in your credit card, give up a substantial service fee, and all for access to dramatically reduced and hyper-focused content.

Choosing Fakku subscription will never be the optimal way to fap. It is simply the moral way, and people who do so are sacrificing a lot to support artists overseas.

Piracy is chosen because piracy works and will never stop working.

Nah, hitomi sucks.

Not really the point.

It all comes down to availability and cost. Let's take it back to the 90's when i was a young pirate. There was no real legal viewing media where i lived nor on tv outside dbz, sailor whore and ronin warriors so i rely on the video stores limited vhs and lazer disk selection and the bbs sub net for fansubs BACK WHEN YOU PAID FOR THE CD VCD OR AVI FILES. Mostly you paid for the blank disk cost and shipping. This was when the American anime companies charged the same price as japan aka ranma 1/2 was 100$ a season. So we had to pirate just to see something or pay 39$ for a vol on vhs or 69 on dvd(dvd was new and expensive). The whole culture was off the net and based on sharing a 6 gen copy with yellow shit sub vhs or vcd since dvd blanks were 3$ a disk. 28.8 modems and the new 56k fax modem didn't really support quality dl or steams so that why it was based on cd disks. This was even the case in bigger cities except they had more video stores and people so there was more products legal and illegal.

That was the death of a lot of anime companies in the west. Charging japanese price to a smaller clientele. In the 2000 to now it way cheaper in most part... fuck pony canyon and animplex. So watching anime legally via collection sets, renting, steaming on nexflix or shitsteams like soggyroll and funi. Doesn't mean i buy everything i watch, but if it good i buy the bd's americana, BUT not all ever get localized and im not spending 100$ on the 2ep disk of a japanese animu so yeah pirate the fuck out of the fansubs mux into the video. Or torrent the tv rips. I have cable and still torrent the tv shows since i like to watch it later and i have to watch later since three shows are on at the same time. Same if you dvr it right.(i don't get the privilege to use my dvr since THEY NEVER FUCKING DELETE THEIR SHIT.)

This is the thing... i don't have to subscribe to read fakku shit. Nor for the books. Unlike the google generation i can google since i had to do this my whole life to find shit. Now we have people giving you the stuff without working for the search. Ever use chat to find a person willing to rip the laser of volton in japanese so they can burn it on 4x to a cd and mail it to your house? It's not like asking for kesha pics of her getting fuck by a dog on 4chan. It was harder and more time consuming.

I still rather just pirate anime and movies if i just wanta see it. I'll buy the good shit and steal the 'welp i just wanta see some tits or check if it that good.' I don't pay for fapping materials... i pay for book hentai and subscriptions here because i read hentai. I don't play with the yogurt rod to chinese cartoon drawings. If paying for hentai is worth not eating or paying for rent or gas then fine. If the conversion of your third world coins is a month paid at your job then fine. Hentai not worth paying, fine. You think everything should be free because it was and your use to not paying for anything, living in your mom's basement, jacking it to sister's ass from the cam you hid in the bathroom, bitching about a guy who owns the media you want saying well paid the price of a pizza or a steam game... sure. It's your allowance. IT'S NOT LIKE IT NOT ON THE NET IN A DAY OR TWO.

Piracy has never been an alternative for me when it comes to financial reasons. It has only been an alternative when it's topographically impossible for me to obtain a certain product. As we're talking about mangas and doujins I'll keep the examples relevant.

FAKKU has made it so that customers can now legitimately buy hentai works. However does it have "Akebono Zome"? Does it have "Estrous Shower"? Does it have "Imako Systems"? If the answer is yes then I see no reason for a devout fan not to buy them! Because as someone who owns original copies of some doujins myself, there's a certain novelty in owning them! However if the answer is no, I also see no reason why customers must wait an indefinite amount of time for when an official translated version will be released. People are beginning to look at hentai as a singular product for some reason. Like if a company is legitimately selling them there would be no problem when in truth, each work has their individual value so just because a company is selling legitimate works, it doesn't mean a customer should ignore one beautiful example he or she saw in pixiv just because the legal seller doesn't have it and not look for ways to obtain it. It's all about availability. I truly believe that with the right price and availability, piracy would be a very small problem in this world.

TBH piracy is not that bad even GABE N said that. is like to try a new thing, if you like then you buy it.
but for some reason this is bad for the companies.
for example when something new is on sale at the stores all wants to buy it but no all can, is in that case that hacking a game, for example is a good way to try the game and decide if u want to buy it or not

Well what I'm getting at in this thread isn't personal reasoning for choosing piracy. It's the fact that we've gotten really good at pirating. It's become really simple for a lot of people. If you want manga or hentai, you only need one good source to get your fix. You don't have to sign up. You don't have to open your wallet. At worst you have to deal with annoying advertisements. But even then people just ad-block and it's all gone. Being a fair customer seems harder. And the pirate doesn't have to care about anything except getting what he wants. There's nobody except basically us (and some scanlators) encouraging others to give back.

So you're just asking what alternatives are there?

EX comes to mind instantly. It's got Direct download & torrents while having wider variety of original h-manga, cosplay galleries, CG Sets, doushinji and western artist's work. It had manageable favorite galleries first, and not mention most importantly it has non-English/Japanese works. As someone who isn't interested in around 90% of the artist in the Wani deal I don't feel like I'm missing out on content either.

I will buy individual books from Fakku sooner or later but at the moment the subscription service doesn't have what I want, and a better alternative has existed for a while. And doujins are in a tricky space, especially for those based on more popular series with the IP holders being giant sticklers in the west seeing a lot of doujins come to fakku is going to be tough since they can't legally sell it. (Something I was trying to tell that Fakku Staff member yesterday)

I want Fakku to succeed, and for them to say they're the "Netflix" of H-manga one day, but at the moment it just isn't so.

Literally US, only and no one else. Everyone from outside will get middle finger for paying them with content unavailable for your country error so fansubbers lost some US visitors but rest of the world still relies on them to see most animes in good quality. Until they cut the crap with licences bullshit both CR and netflix are completely irrelevant to bigger market.

But can it really be done? I think there's a limit to how easy it gets. And from a technical standpoint I see no reason to believe why piracy can't keep up with legitimate options. Especially for this type of media. I think the best FAKKU could possibly do at this point in time is somehow score a deal with a 1-click payment processor service (fat chance). It won't happen anytime soon. And if FAKKU deals with things like card numbers directly that becomes a huge liability in the event of a security breach. It's a lot of trouble.

Computers are just really, really useful tools. I'm sure there are many people who have a simple script that monitors torrent hubs for anime series they're interested in. They don't have to fuss with anything most of the time. Anything they wanted to watch is already on their computer by the time they get home from work. That type of user has no practical incentive to choose legal options. It makes me wonder why that sort of thing hasn't caught on already. Or maybe it has and I'm out of the loop.

Really what you have to understand is fakku is just taking the first real step towards making it easier to not pirate. Not easier than pirating is, but making it not impossible to be legit.

Go way back and what options did you have if you wanted to get h-manga legit? You had to go to a brick and mortar store and buy it. Impossible for people outside Japan, so piracy was the easiest (and only) option.

Go later and online retailers start showing up. Still a pain in the ass because you have to navigate a Japanese website and deal with issues such as companies that don't sell to foreigners or having your credit card get rejected (because it's trying to be used in japan) and having to call up your bank to let them accept the transaction. And after all that you'll get a raw, censored manga.

The English side of dlsite was a pretty big step forward from all that bullshit, although it still suffers from the issue of most of the actual content there being in Japanese.


And now you have fakku. You just give them a credit card and get uncensored, fully translated releases of new h-manga. Fakku makes it easier to not pirate than it's ever been before. It's easy to lose sight of this because to most people fakku is the first time the idea of actually supporting h-manga producers has ever even entered their minds; it was just that impossible to do before.

The reality is that it's probably always going to easier to pirate than to not pirate. That's just the reality of the material being distributed. But if you can make it not a huge pain in the ass to be legit: You'll have people willing to be legit.

Yeah they're expensive and restrictive but why? Why is music and videos the only digital industries doing so and in badly manner.
Are they even case with animes? Yeah sure there were few animes aired here and here and published physically but for majority, most of europe is like black hole, we ain't getting shit so why no one creates market here? Are they really expecting that licensing cost won't return or just don't give a shit? I'll go with the latter because Steam and GOG proved that with accessibility comes customers and money, hell Steam even dealt huge blow to piracy in Russia which seems like miracle by bringing their currency and adjusting prices to region.

I'm not saying FAKKU won't get better. Actually I'm sure it will. I'm quite enthusiastic about what's to come. But the point of this discussion isn't about how well they're doing. My original argument is that because piracy is so disgustingly easy, especially in these cases where piracy is arguably easier than legal options, piracy is the winner. I don't necessarily think FAKKU is doing it wrong. I'm sure it will overcome a lot of the problems it's having especially with payment options. The challenge here is for FAKKU's service to overcome the pirate's service.

As for the scripting thing, why not? Spend a few days making that into a robust piece of software (I doubt it's that complicated) with a fleshed out gui and then it's an accessible platform for anyone. I could probably do it myself if I wanted to but I have no interest in doing so. But this is kind of my point. If someone goes ahead and does this, and it works really well, what's to stop that from becoming the standard practice?

I meant distributing that software. The person making it would set up one of those adfly things or w/e and make a quick buck. Only one person has to make the software.

did you guys hear about this?
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2016-01-23/erotic-manga-artist-threatens-to-quit-unless-pirates-stop/.96879