Mangadex gets hit by DMCA - more than 25% of chapters gone | staff FAQ update

[T-sama]

I am with you 100% things gone into some weird direction even I don't want to be

Oh please, it's not a weird direction if nobody got naked

 

[SuperOniichan]

@volodyuka and @T-sama I highly discourage you to continue the topic about country politics, also @SuperOniichan, is understable how the topic started with T-sama insisting about ignoring DMCA since days ago, but really, make a pause about that specific aspect of the conversation

No problem, I wasn't going to continue it anyway, since this isn't a "realpolitik" chat and I try not to develop it so that I don't get carried away. I've had enough of discussions about some "true story inspired" mangas where stuff like this quickly turns the chapter discussion into a Po board branch, lmao.

 

[manadrop]

Welp, guess that explains why I couldn't see any logic in what got purged and not from my trusty tablet reader. And if that many series affected, odds are there's plenty to come as the requests gets processed. Sad times, but I guess all nice and convenient things must come to an end.

On an unrelated note, I wonder if I could muster up enough brain cells able and willing to learn Japanese.... 🤔 Probably not.

 

[volodyuka]

On an unrelated note, I wonder if I could muster up enough brain cells able and willing to learn Japanese.... 🤔 Probably not.

well if you will be able to tolerate hieroglyphs not that hard (I learned like elementary level years ago but going deeper into hieroglyphs and grammar won over me) aaaaand it's not going to help. a lot of manga in japanese is region locked. and services are a pain to use. ordering physical releases from japan... well will cost you an arm and a leg.

 

[T-sama]

@manadrop @volodyuka
It looks simple, just learn how to read moonrunes, unfortunately it's just as hard to get the mangas lol, many sites and apps are region locked, even if you can buy it's expensive no matter if apps, digital manga or physical manga, I think torrent is one of the only ways to properly get raws

I do think there's technically a few readers and sites with raws, but good luck discovering new stuff, especially if it's not popular

Unfortunately reading fan translation is pretty much the only way to have any convenient access to manga in general

 

[rh75]

I'm too old to learn Japanese and don't have the time either.
So I started going through my library and doing my own purge of titles never to spend a penny on, and nothing makes sense.
There are series removed that were completely published 20, 15, 10 years ago that will never be released in the West nor in Japan again.
Also I'm sure there will be another 1k DMCA in a few weeks.

I just wonder what the Japanese executives' faces will look like when revenue doesn't increase?

 

[T-sama]

I'm too old to learn Japanese and don't have the time either.

Even if you're young and have time it's still massive pain in the ass to learn, learning Asian language just isn't for everyone due to the moonrunes lol

So I started going through my library and doing my own purge of titles never to spend a penny on, and nothing makes sense.
There are series removed that were completely published 20, 15, 10 years ago that will never be released in the West nor in Japan again.
Also I'm sure there will be another 1k DMCA in a few weeks.

I saw some manga from the publishers that had other series taken down, so my take? There's two possibilities:

1 - the dmca are based on specific magazines

2 - it really is Koreans doing it and just grabbing random series just to make massive damage

Either one would explain why it feels so random what series got removed

I just wonder what the Japanese executives' faces will look like when revenue doesn't increase?

They won't care, piracy is evil + in their head they're they're least not losing money, as long as it's removed they're happy, no nuance or arguing why piracy happens and how much should be allowed.

 

[JagdPanther]

Well, serves me right for dragging my feet for so long on so many series. Several of my favorite series that I was very slowly working my way through got rolled.

It's a good thing that since the DOS attacks a few years back that caused the temporary loss of our reading history I've been keeping an Excel sheet of all the series I'm reading and what chapter I'm on, so at least I still know now where I was when the purge happened.

 

[ichigoteguz]

I find this action by the publishers a bit ironic. Of all the places where scanlated manga gathers, MangaDex is probably one of the most respectful and organized. You regularly see messages like “go support the author here,” and I personally have filled several bookshelves with manga I first discovered on MangaDex. Without it, I probably wouldn’t have read, or bought, those series at all.

In contrast, other aggregator sites show zero respect for the creators. They slap on paywalls, beg for donations via Ko-fi or Patreon, and when hit with a DMCA, they just shut down and redirect traffic to a clone site with a slightly different name. It's shameless. And yet, the publishers are targeting the platform that’s arguably their biggest source of goodwill in the West.

Piracy isn’t solved through enforcement, it’s solved by making the legitimate experience better than the pirated one (Louis Rossmann has several great videos on YouTube about this, and I highly recommend them). Instead, we get official translations that are often overly localized, censored, or just plain inferior. Off the top of my head, Tomo-chan is a Girl and Demi-chan wa Kataritai are two that really suffered from this.

Truly sad times we’ve come upon.

 

[dmy96]

Several of the series that was not fully purged earlier with 1-2 chapters remaining was fully purged today. either by MD or scanslator themselves. Expect the rest to follows.

 

[SilverExp]

Looks like I'll be creating a Weeb Central account to keep reading the series that got nuked here... Still a shame, they only have the more popular stuff.

Ironically, some titles there have their chapters stolen from scanlators that only upload their chapters exclusively on MangaDex (would have been harder to notice if they deleted credits pages or something, but fortunately they don't).

So to any scan group that may have their chapters taken down here and don't have the files locally, you might find your stuff there.

 

[hahanaho]

anyone got suggestion for a new hobby?

I do actually. Origami. Arguably the perfect hobby. Literally endless instructions on youtube and pirated ebooks site.

You can use the cheapest origami paper you can find. No need for specialty paper for very complex model. A lot of easier models are still fun to fold and look impressive. Jo Nakashima's penguin on youtube is pretty great.

 

[giffer8810]

I hope it was worth it sucking up to the official publishers.
Most of my follows are DMCA'd now.

welcome to being human?

 

[Variousletters]

I find this action by the publishers a bit ironic. Of all the places where scanlated manga gathers, MangaDex is probably one of the most respectful and organized. You regularly see messages like “go support the author here,” and I personally have filled several bookshelves with manga I first discovered on MangaDex. Without it, I probably wouldn’t have read, or bought, those series at all.

You have to remember two things: It's not so much publishers in the sense of "the ones who printed out your book" nowadays. It's publishers in the sense of "the investment group that owns the holdings corporation that owns the company that owns your publishers". Doesn't matter how bad an action is long-term, only what you can claim you've done THIS quarter NOW.

• They're also notorious in video and music, for not actually caring whether or not they have the rights to a work before making claims against someone for it. Guilty until proven innocent, so let's just accuse everyone.

And the other thing is, those scraping aggregators with paywalls that all have the same layout and gating? Some of them are held by companies after following enough of the money. Get rid of the free places, and at least a small percentage of the audience will "it's just two dollars" a chapter.

 

[ClueByFour]

Piracy isn’t solved through enforcement, it’s solved by making the legitimate experience better than the pirated one

Yup. Piracy is a legitimate market force, even if nobody mentions it aloud in our current society. If people aren't aware, the American science-fiction/fantasy book publisher Baen actually still makes lots of money selling unencrypted, DRM-free ebooks, and has been doing it since the late 90s. How do they do it? They offer free sample chapters of the first quarter of every book they publish, charge a reasonable price, don't make accessing your copies a pain in the ass, and (here's the big part) most people would rather be legit if you just don't gouge them. Hell, Baen even found that including CDs in the binding of books with entire series' worth of ebooks even increased sales of the hardcopies of the ebooks included in the CDs!

If people overwhelmingly prefer piracy, to the point that some of them are even willing to jump through hoops like translation/cleaning/redrawing... Well, the market is acting because the publishers are fucking up.

...Unfortunately for all of us, fucking it up by the numbers is the publishers' legal prerogative.

 

[LuckyTanuki]

Anyone have any information on which company is the one that issued the DMCA? I'd like to know so I know who to never purchase from again. Seriously I've actually bought Manga and light novels on Amazon that I wouldn't have otherwise had I not read some of it for free online. Such a spit in the face to the western market. Like what harm is there in allowing these fan translated Manga, when you have no intention of professionally translating it over to English... Or when you are slow as s*** to actually license it out of Japan. Fuck the company that caused this, like I said, I need a name if anyone knows. I'm about to swear off the Anime community as a whole since they don't seem to respect the western audience.

 

[hahanaho]

Anyone have any information on which company is the one that issued the DMCA? I'd like to know so I know who to never purchase from again. Seriously I've actually bought Manga and light novels on Amazon that I wouldn't have otherwise had I not read some of it for free online. Such a spit in the face to the western market. Like what harm is there in allowing these fan translated Manga, when you have no intention of professionally translating it over to English... Or when you are slow as s*** to actually license it out of Japan. Fuck the company that caused this, like I said, I need a name if anyone knows. I'm about to swear off the Anime community as a whole since they don't seem to respect the western audience.

Someone said Comeso GmbH. Even if not that exact one, probably another similar company. Basically there are 3rd-party companies who use bots and third-world slaves to mass-DMCA the internet.

 

[ichigoteguz]

Anyone have any information on which company is the one that issued the DMCA?

Rumors on Reddit claim Kakao talked the big fish at other publishers to form an alliance about it, take that as you will.

 

[McMaster]

Ow shit here we go again.

 

[bondejeger]

Welp, guess that explains why I couldn't see any logic in what got purged and not from my trusty tablet reader. And if that many series affected, odds are there's plenty to come as the requests gets processed. Sad times, but I guess all nice and convenient things must come to an end.

On an unrelated note, I wonder if I could muster up enough brain cells able and willing to learn Japanese.... 🤔 Probably not.

https://djtguide.github.io/