You wouldn’t scanslate a car
Some things said by Ken Akamatsu, Minako Uchida, Kazumi Tojo about manga piracy on February 22 and 23.
Manga Artists and Mr. Ken Akamatsu: “Hasn’t Illegally Scanned Manga Fallen To ‘Property of the Internet’?” (Togetter)
KenAkamatsu Am I too late? I get the feeling that [my project to release free manga PDFs] won’t be enough at this point. RT 7039 people “liked” this with their real names… RT To nobody’s surprise, Facebook is permitting the [illegal] manga reading app: http://ow.ly/40mvf
petitmango @KenAkamatsu I can’t believe that many people have no respect for the law! This is really quite terrible, but I’m glad to assist your project at every step.
KenAkamatsu I feel like people are less aware these days of this type of crime. Including Apple and Baidu (w).
KenAkamatsu Hasn’t illegally scanned manga, propagated so casually like this, fallen into the category of “property of the Internet”? You won’t be able to eliminate it. The only thing we can do at this point is [launch our own free websites with the] “advertising model”. (Because charging people would be difficult.)
KenAkamatsu The most recent illegal scans are very high quality, and the translations are exceedingly accurate. (^^;) If there’s no respect for original authors on the net, then obviously the official versions will lose out.
honey__milk One of the causes is surely the cheap and efficient commercial scanners on the market.
jubeifang @KenAkamatsu This is completely true. Furthermore, some readers, believing the illegal scanslations to be the “original version”, demanded that an official translator correct his translation to match the pirate version. It’s seriously bad.
KenAkamatsu @jubeifang Seriously?
jubeifang This actually happened. According to my colleague, some readers were reading a pirated version of a certain Jump manga online. Specifically, when a new character was introduced, the scanslators decided the character’s name reading first. Afterwards, when the official translator translated the name…
jubeifang …these readers e-mailed the company, demanding, “Change the new character’s name to the version used in the pirate edition!” A bizarre story, but true.
KenAkamatsu @jubeifang Oh dear. (^^;)
_unkonwn_ I think there are a lot of people who just think as long as they can read it, it’s okay. Those people probably don’t care how the manga gets to them or even about quality, as long as there’s a lot of it released quickly. Even with high image quality, I’m concerned they won’t want to read the official version if they find the ads annoying.
KenAkamatsu @_unkonwn_ This is indeed an issue.
KenAkamatsu Also, although the “cell phone ero (and BL) manga” industry has been booming, with the decline of J-phones I’m afraid it won’t last another one or two years. Ero manga can’t be sold on iPhones or Kindles, but does Android allow it? Let me know.
beepcap @KenAkamatsu Android allows it, albeit unofficially.
syouda @KenAkamatsu It seems that the cell phone ero manga world is starting to switch to Android.
[etc.]
Grievances of the Manga Artists (Togetter)
kazumi_tojyo One of my friends said this– I can read it on the Web for free, so why should I pay? FYI, he’s a perfectly decent person. But he has the money to pay. His job is paid out of my tax dollars [government employees in Japan are well-paid, and are held with very high expectations of lawfulness]. His lifestyle is as close to mine as possible. It’s a very depressing thing.
tanpuck @kazumi_tojyo In Japan there are plenty of unattended sales booths [vegetable stalls and the like], but nearly everyone pays like they ought to. A citizen who takes things from an unattended sales booth is the object of “shame”. Isn’t downloading things online the same thing? Rather than emphasizing the crime of piracy, I feel like we should make people aware and make them feel shame for their actions.
kazumi_tojyo @tanpuck You can say stuff like that, or you can point out that this is our livelihood... and I feel like the reaction would be “so what?”. That fucker who buys his hamburgers with my tax money… I’m losing it here. I’d love to see what would happen if I notified his chain of command… but enough. [Fun fact: the Japanese 上部機関 "chain of command/overseeing institution" doesn't seem to have an exact English equivalent]
kazumi_tojyo It seems like people will pay for things they can touch like vegetables, but they think it’s a waste to pay for intangible data. They’ll only scrounge up a few dozen or hundred yen. They’ll pay however many thousands of yen for a TV, not realizing that the stuff you see on TV [also costs money to make and] can disappear!
zerra01 @kazumi_tojyo @tanpuck I feel like my sense of shame is disappearing as well. Or rather, the shameful things I’m doing are completely different from what they were in the past.
tanpuck @kazumi_tojyo What you’ve got to realize is that person is not just giving you his private opinion, but you’d have to manufacture an emotion about something that’s been common knowledge for some time. The emotion you call shame, right? That’s not a prevalent emotion in Japan.
kazumi_tojyo @tanpuck You’re right. People think, “I’m only using [the site]. What’s the problem?”, but … (´д｀；)
masyuuki I think the rotten belief that “the best guys will naturally survive” has become pervasive.
zerra01 Agreed. Essentially, you could say that people take pleasure in instant gratification without noticing that their repeated plunder is rendering the soil barren…
kazumi_tojyo You’re right. So, people who would never think of shoplifting a book are okay with it, because it’s data. Depressing stuff.
tanpuck Someone with a lot of charisma, like a manga star, could probably change the atmosphere, but there’s not really anyone like that right now… (^^;) There’s nobody who will seriously take on the Net like the mainstream media did in the Napster era.
zerra01 I feel the same way. I feel like that sometimes, but there’s nobody out there, huh. The MSM views the Net as a rival, but they’re making use of it all the time. And, good reputations get overturned in a single night. Even politicians no longer have serious reputations but get by on saying clever things. I think that we’re entering an era of insurmountable turbulence.
kazumi_tojyo I wish I could take it easy without getting all angry and depressed like this…
February 23rd, 2011 at 4:11 am
I think a big cause of how widespread manga scanlation piracy is just from how there’s no other “casual” way to follow the comics. As it is now, to buy them you basically have to do the equivalent of buying the DVD box set of a TV show season by season instead of just catching an episode on TV week by week. In Japan you can pick up a magazine for 500 yen or so, read it, and then toss it out each week. Sure, shounen jump comes out here, but who wants to get one chapter a MONTH? You can’t even remember what’s going on, or talk with people online about the story or anything, because you’re way behind. Anime is in basically the same boat, but at least official streams are becoming more and more common.
I always have and always will buy my manga, but it takes up so much space, and there’s no 2nd hand place to sell them near me, so I really hope they come up with an online method soon. I don’t even care about ads, subscriptions, being behind everybody else, translations, whatever!! Just give it to me!!
February 23rd, 2011 at 6:06 am
上部機関 is a management chain. HTH HAND
February 23rd, 2011 at 8:06 am
[...] is pretty juicy: Welcome Datacomp translates two conversations about manga piracy that took place on the Japanese social networking site Togetter between Ken Akamatsu, Minako [...]
February 23rd, 2011 at 12:01 pm
[...] blog called Welcome Datacomp has translated a discussion of manga piracy between manga creators Ken Akamatsu (Love Hina, Negima), Minako Uchida, and Kazumi Tojo that took [...]
February 23rd, 2011 at 1:14 pm
Has anyone told them it costs $10-12/tankoubon here? You’d think they’d know, but all the ordinary Japanese people that I know who’ve found out about it have been totally appalled and have said things like “In that case I wouldn’t buy manga anymore.”
(I buy manga used, which doesn’t really help the creators either…)
February 23rd, 2011 at 4:24 pm
If more people would support the manga industry in the U.S., publishers would be able to drive prices down. But because scanlations and scanlation aggregators are becoming such a problem, publishers have no choice but to keep raising prices. When the cost of Naruto has to go up, you know something’s wrong. But if everyone who read manga online bought the books, publishers would be able to support a title at a lower cover price. Problem is, no one wants to pay, no one wants to be patient. Most Japanese magazines only come out once a month. And there’s usually much more time between releases than three or four months as far as the books go. So basically, the American market sees manga as cheap and easy entertainment, not as a piece of art that someone spent time and energy working on. For a lot of people, as soon as they have to pay, they stop reading. It’s disposable. And until that attitude changes, manga’s always going to struggle.
February 23rd, 2011 at 8:38 pm
manga actually was cheap and easy entertainment in japan for quite a while. the problem is that by the time you get to the English version there’s so many layers in the chain that the cost to actually buy a volume is no longer cheap. the problem isn’t so much sales volume (even if you get all the pirates to buy, there’s only so much market for manga over all, let alone different types that actually compete with each other directly) as the kinds of fees the Japanese publishers charge for licenses. more sales might help… or it might just lead to higher demands for licensing fees which drive it up more. there’s all sorts of factors playing into it, really… not least is that manga is Not mainstream outside of japan, and you can’t expect it to be.
then there’s the facts that come out of research on other industries experiancing similar issues. what’s happening here, generally speaking, is that the people who would have bought… are buying, what they would have bought… and are reading the other stuff they would barely have even glanced at before rejecting online… while others are finding stuff online and going ‘hey, that’s cool’ and buying it when it comes out.
some things never come out.
the reasearch i was talking about has (when not twisted around to use as support for lobbying for increase in monopoly rents) shown that the people who pirate most are also the ones who Buy most. what hits the sales is not generally piracy. not on any meaningful scale. it’s inability to satisfy demand for various factors (manga for example, is slow and over priced by the time you get to official english versions, even more so outside of the states. why, exactly, does it cost half as much to buy the equivalent chunk of story as anime as it does to buy the manga volumes, for example?) combined with globally unfortunate economic conditions and, something people love to neglect, the fact that the cconsumer doesn’t generaly have a ‘manga’ budget. they have an ‘entertainment’ budget. forget piracy, the manga must compete with video games, novels, movies, tv, sports, and various other hobbies. compared to the vast majority of these things it costs a hell of a lot more for a lot less. a volume of manga will keep me occupied for about half an hour for ~$20 nz. that same money will get me a movie in the theater and some food, a dvd volume (which is 2+ hours and, if anime, about 3x the story if it’s the same series). five-six volumes of manga, or an entire anime season, come to about 120… price of a video game, which, if it’s any good, represents in excess of 20 hours of entertainment (usually closer to 100). hell, going Bowling is more entertainment, for less, than a volume of manga… AND you can do it with your friends.
Manga has a lot of issues, here. piracy is the least of them (if properly leveraged it’s free advertising!).
so much for scanlations vs official translations.
of course, it’s harder to make a case for those who simply upload scans of the official english translations (and seriously, how much audacity does it take to do this… Including the copyright pages? seen that :S), but that’s a moral thing. from a bottom line company point of view the difference is nill. these things are a fact of life. they’re not going away. attempting to get rid of them just burns company reputation, which looses sales. better to find a way to profit from them.
maybe they can avoid going through the same idiotic tax-payer scamming, money-hemorrhaging litigious idiocy that the music and movie industries are.
up shot of all this: piracy doesn’t affect sales much in a net negative way, and even if it does, trying to stamp it out just makes it cost you more. Manga, at least, needs to show up faster, cheaper, on the rare occasion competing is an issue.
also significant: manga is often seen as an extention of shojo, apparantly. when it’s not it’s seen as an extension of shonen cartoons. changing That, getting adults interested, will probably get you a lot more sales too…
i’m sure there’s a lot of industry specific technicalities to the details of all this i don’t know about, but i Have been following a lot of stuff on intellectual property (which is an insane myth, btw. they’re straight up monopoly rents, nothing more, nothing less), ‘digital piracy’, and so on… and watching the music and movie industries, and to a lesser extent game industry, shoot themselves in the foot over and over…. parts of the publishing industry have done like wise, others have actually learned the lessons for the others, avoided it, and are doing quite well.
hopefully manga can do likewise.
(hint: the single biggest factor is Conveniance. people will pay more (to a point) to get things Easier, Faster, and closer to what they want. additionally, people see the main cost of books as being Printing costs (because they ARE!) and thus will tend to revolt if you attempt to sell them the digital work (which is, honestly, near pure profit per volume. it’s only your initial investment you’ve got to make back) a number of american publishers and authors (and shops. the whole kindle thing’s a nightmare) are currently screwing up by charging MORE for the e-book than for the paperback version. bad move.)
people in the west don’t have a lot of respect for the law in some areas, including IP, no. this is because it is Regularly horribly abused by corporations they cannot afford to fight back against to deprive them of rights and livelyhood (SONY is a prime example, (someone please correct me if i’ve got the company wrong) having been known to bring unwinable law suits against competitors, or even Potentual competitors to their clients, until the Legal fees bankrupted them. when this kind of shit starts happening, and the law makes no sense (and current copyright law is moronic, whatever the original Point was), respect for the law as an instrument of justice is lost, and it is viewed as an instrument of oppression instead. (additionally, Slow justice undermines faith in the law, too. if a case takes years to make it through the court system, people don’t really see justice done, just more bureaucracy.)
now, i know no one of any significance will ever read my comments in the normal course of things, but this is my understanding of things, and hopefully if by some fluke chance it IS read, it will be useful.
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/ << these guys are greet for getting your head around the whole IP issue… as well as making 'how to succeed in spite of things changing and progressing rather than fighting it and shooting yourself in the foot' their business. they particularly seem to like conversing with industry people directly.
February 23rd, 2011 at 8:43 pm
i see no edit button :S
“…and thus will tend to revolt if you attempt to sell them the digital work …”
should be
“… and thus will tend to revolt if you attempt to sell them the digital work at the same price as the physical edition…” or something to that effect.
February 24th, 2011 at 2:54 am
well, this is conflicting. because we, online readers mostly doesnt have any way except online. i read online because so little offically selled here! and do they even know how much illegal copies here? trying to be kind and buying offically here.. nah, just the same. those illegal companies got the profit not them.. and some readers getting cocky and saying doesnt wanna buy coz they can get it free, because we know publisher themself is not exactly doing good job and unknowingly we get arrogant. well, can anyone blame them? i myself buy offical manga whenever possible, but how much ppl knows mine is offical? what if many ppl actually victim? trying to buy officals manga but getting lied to? i bet many like that here. so even if we wanna trusted them,wait for them, hoping they give salvation. we all know they can`t. why they can`t? i dont wanna answer this obvious thing.
and the manga artist doesnt get money with online viewers (or so they think).. well, without online manga it wont known overseas this much. you wont have that much fans.. you probably doesnt get many ppl wanna help this current situation either.. why only think, about bad things because online viewer? keep saying trying to learn mistakes by doing free offical manga online view too but never actually done it. if you all just doing offical manga site sooner it wont become rooted like this, what idiocy.
claiming both are right was wrong too, actually. why paid if we can get it free? dont be hypocrite, you know its wrong but can u even reject it! everyone wants money, and even they have, they want to save as much they can to survive this today`s society. calling it buy in legal way to justify when were not actually different is sickens me. not everyone like that! we tried to make a better way, but those offical publisher just think of profit, not our feelings and never even tried to see from our persepective! was there even one person wanna believe them? even if we wanna try to believe, their corrupt thinking of high ways make it no one can actually believe them! before stating which is right and wrong way, try to correct this wrongness inside first.
justify your action without even trying to solve better solution but actually busy blaming right and left good and evil, nothing can happened, while not even goes up to front and trying is so goddamn selfish no matter which ways.
February 24th, 2011 at 4:41 am
I feel its more a shift towards a change in business model. When musicians make more money off shows than CD’s, its because they’re not selling a product but rather themselves. People who buy physical copies these days are more so heavy consumers than casual ones. These are the people who buy to show off. But for the rest of us we read and forget. Now we’re working with a medium that’s incredibly cheap to distribute and duplicate, and right now its replacing the current weekly magazine, that you would normally buy and probably toss in a few months once it built up. These days its no longer the faceless consumer you’re catering to, but your specific fan base who will pay for more of what you do. This is going to be a change in how people make money, and this is a shift someone will have to figure out to make this industry work.
February 24th, 2011 at 4:53 am
I wonder why manga companies have not invested in current and emerging anti scan paper technologies. There are papers now which are designed to leave a watermark when scanned. By simply altering this to a distracting and disruptive pattern, they could make scanned pages look anywhere from ugly to utterly unreadable.
February 24th, 2011 at 10:26 am
Thanks for the translation.
February 24th, 2011 at 12:20 pm
I will tell you the facts; I do go onto scanlation sites to read manga, however, whenever I have the money I still go to the local barnes and noble to buy certain comics (Japanese or American). Truth be told I feel guilty because, lets face facts, they creators don’t get paid a dime while the sites reap a profit from ad revenue. However, it would cost me thousands of dollars to purchase all of the manga I want to read. It is simply too damn expensive. Second is the automatic convenience. Go onto the URL and bam, it is all there to be read. Personally this is all how this should end: There must be a subscription based or advertising manga library site. And when I mean subscription it is something that is very cheap like, 5 bucks a month. Just like with Netflix. If it is that cheap people will pay because it will be:
“Should I take this for free and the creators doesn’t get a buck or pay a measly five bucks per month and they get some money?”
Anybody with a job who chooses number 1 over number 2 has some true douchebag genes flowing through their body.
March 10th, 2011 at 2:13 am
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March 15th, 2011 at 6:04 pm
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