everything that is licensed is HOSTED BY YOU GUYS, One punch man, Ranma, berserk, blade of the immortal. Sure you have the rule "no licensed material" yet it is hard NOT TO FIND licensed.
Damn Pirates!!
Just a point of clarification: This site does not accept official releases of series, but it does accept fan scanlations of series,
even if that series does happen to be licensed.
2.1 Scans of official releases or webcomics from official sources, such as original releases (raws) or officially translated releases, are not allowed to be uploaded.
2.2 The existence of an official translation has no relevance to the rules for uploading scanlated releases.
2.3.1 Using the translated script of an official release as the basis of a scanlation is allowed only if the script has been re-translated into a different language.
This is my interpretation of those rules:
- Not allowed: take the official Dark Horse Berserk volumes, scan them, and upload them here
- Not allowed: scan the original Japanese Berserk volumes, copy the translated script from the Dark Horse volumes into a scanlation, and then upload them here
- Allowed: scan the original Japanese Berserk volumes, do the translation/scanlation yourself, and then upload here
- Allowed: scan the original Japanese Berserk volumes, translate the script from the Dark Horse volumes into a different language (e.g. Spanish, French, etc.), and then upload here
So yes, those series are licensed, but the translations here are not the ones released by the licensors; they are the ones done by fans.
It's worth noting that even if we did have a policy of not hosting
any series that have been officially licensed, that would be very difficult to manage because there are
lots of countries out there that all have different sets of manga licensed. Example: some of my favourite manga series have been licensed in French, but not in English. (-_-)
Scanlation has always been a legal grey area and a point of controversy. Some argue that piracy hurts sales because who's going to buy something that they can get for free? Some argue that pirates are the largest fans and they make the most purchases. On an unrelated note, that reminds of this article that I read recently, which discusses scanlation and piracy in some detail: https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/07/manga-pirates-are-having-trouble-going-legit/ Not sure how I feel about it.
In any case, there are tons of other manga aggregator sites out there, but this site, although legally dubious, has a slight moral high ground over most of the other manga aggregator sites out there, because like Batoto before us:
1. This site preserves attribution to the scanlators.
2. This site does not profit from ads.
We're all pirates here though, not gonna deny that.