The world as we know it is changing.

Andoru-Kun · 2010-06-11T22:32:11+00:00

A few days ago, Japan's Digital Comic Association announced a historic move by the Manga industry. The short version is: the Publishers will no longer sit idly by and watch the scanlation/fansubbing community spread their work. They have identified multiple different sources of copyrighted material and have/are proceeding to warn/close them. This is already taking effect, the website owners of MangaHelpers(all raws and scanlations will be removed as of July 1st) has already shut themselves down. The publishers of Japan as well as America and elsewhere are forming a coalition of sorts to stomp out all forms of "piracy" on their content. Multiple different blogs and scanlation site's are already pending to lcose as per the request(read:Threat) of publisher's. Along with the changing internet and copyright laws of multiple contries already going through respective forms of congress and legislation. Many countries already follow a "3 strikes your out" rule. With respective levels of punsihement ending with complete removal of your internet connection capabilites and being taken to court. The creators of MangaHelpers along with a few others are creating a site theyve called OpenManga. Visit it to find out more. Alongside CrunchyRoll, these two just might become the only places stateside to "legally" feed your love of anime/manga/light novels/Visual Novels. Please proceed to discuss these recent events. (Edit):UPDATE- Yukimura, An admin of manga traders has reported the following- "The site is offline due to hardware issues on the web server. As far as we can tell this issue is unrelated to the problems we've been dealing with on the file servers for the last month or so. We are working on getting the site back up but real life concerns will likely slow the process down."

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shinji_ikari Mustn't Run Away...

14 years ago

gizgal wrote...

Agree with you fully on that, Shinji. Still, it would be good if instead of ignoring the popularity and convenience of such formats, they might instead embrace something similar but paid-for.

this is an idea I could get behind , a type of iTunes for manga would be great ,our even a monthly online subscription like service that lets me read all my favorites as they come out in japan (much like the tokyopop DUAL translation books that came out for awhile , but got scrapped cause they where being illegally uploaded)

strangegreycat

14 years ago

I can't believe I forgot about this article.

BeatleBomb

14 years ago

It'll be interesting to see how everything plays out, though in the end I think we all know what will happen; be it video game or visual novel, television or animé series, no matter what laws may be instated, people will never stop pirating. Unless EXTREMELY strict and widespread enforcement of said laws occurs, I don't see any other possible outcome. And what if they ARE enforced, one may ask? Like smoking marijuana, underage drinking, and owning firearms or other forms of weaponry, people will still find a way to sneak past the rules and regulations.

zetsubuobilly

14 years ago

There's no problem to me if they do put prices for reading manga, but the problem is many people would use that to their advantage and tend to overprice rather than giving the fair price. Especially in our country, many of our people here are poor but reads manga, they can't even afford to eat 3 meals a day, so how would those people afford for their little pleasure?

THE ECONOMY

14 years ago

shinji_ikari wrote...

I have to say I'm a bit disgusted by some of the responses I've seen on here in relation to this..WTF gives you the right to get MAD that people don't want you taking their hard work for free. I felt exactly the same way about music and now it's happening to anime/manga. If something is TOTALLY unavailable then I can understand ,but majority of the stuff people want to get for free is stuff they CAN get in their respective countries or through a very affordable import site. Point of the matter is that your being a thief ,and your willingness to help people continue to steal is horrifying ,perhaps you just need a group a guys coming in taking all your work and giving it away ?

And why are you visiting this site again?

Thou fool, thou hypocrite! Cast first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull the mote that is in thy brother's eye.

strangegreycat wrote...

I expect this will probably make things worse before it makes things better.

There'll be a huge backlash, both inside and outside Japan.

Just like with the movie/music industry. Only that it didn't and it just made everything worse, period. Whoops!

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