Kamigami no Kago de Seisan Kakumei - Ch. 9.1

[IonDrako]

we are not selling exclusive chapters or extras, we are not locking any exclusive content behind a paywall nor are we trying to monetize your screen by begging you to use our site that we plaster with ads. the only tangible benefit you get from giving us money is access to chapters as soon as they are finished, those chapters are uploaded to mangadex on a set schedule, and that schedule is about as fast as we think we can have chapters done consistently, we don't have an archive of chapters backlogged just sitting around or anything. In my opinion its the least possible scummy donation incentive or method of recouping our losses. As I said previously, the group isn't being run for profit, but we also cant simply eat the costs entirely on our own, and the pure kindness of strangers is insufficient to cover it.

Feel like the main point though is that the group is hard capping how many chapters they let out to the public while locking however many behind a paywall for however long it takes the 3 "chapters" a month amount to slowly trickle out.


There's multiple ways to handle patreon stuff without it feeling that crappy imo. Like having a grace period after something is done being translated like 3-7 days where patrons or what have you can read it early before it get's uploaded, then the patrons get to feel special and people here aren't as peeved after reading the end card which sounds a lot better saying you get a couple days early access to completed chapter than essentially saying "buy into our patreon to get access to these chapters we're technically withholding for the sake of making money for 1-2 months". (Especially series like this that have their chapters cut into 3 parts in the raws which means we're sitting on 1 complete chapter a month based on the written amount uploaded)


Advertising that there's at least 2 complete fan translated chapters locked behind a patreon paywall while mangadex gets three 1/3rd sized chapters a month was always going to be met with some disdain from the readers here

 

[Jakeh24]

Feel like the main point though is that the group is hard capping how many chapters they let out to the public while locking however many behind a paywall for however long it takes the 3 "chapters" a month amount to slowly trickle out.


There's multiple ways to handle patreon stuff without it feeling that crappy imo. Like having a grace period after something is done being translated like 3-7 days where patrons or what have you can read it early before it get's uploaded, then the patrons get to feel special and people here aren't as peeved after reading the end card which sounds a lot better saying you get a couple days early access to completed chapter than essentially saying "buy into our patreon to get access to these chapters we're technically withholding for the sake of making money for 1-2 months". (Especially series like this that have their chapters cut into 3 parts in the raws which means we're sitting on 1 complete chapter a month based on the written amount uploaded)


Advertising that there's at least 2 complete fan translated chapters locked behind a patreon paywall while mangadex gets three 1/3rd sized chapters a month was always going to be met with some disdain from the readers here

Was just about to comment the same.
While I get ya have to pay the staff and all other jazz such as raws. there's soo many less scummy ways to go about it, at the end of the day it jus boils down to withholding chapters on patreon. The justification used jus isn't good enough

 

[Aricitic]

Hello, I am Xlis1, a proofreader for Nyanu Kafe as well as numerous other groups (GD, Shit Scans, Shadow-sama scans, Akatsuki scans, as well as a few other smaller groups/projects)


Before I start here I feel the need to express that every view point shared within this post is my own and exclusively my own, i do not speak for any of the aforementioned groups or the people in them. If you have problems with anything I say, please restrict criticism to me alone, I was not asked to come and argue our case or anything of the sort, In fact our group leader discouraged me from posting here, but I feel strongly enough to do so regardless.


Nyanu Kafe pays their staff, personally i decline payment for my proofreading for them as I'd rather that money go to the TL's and RD's who do far more laborious work than simple proofreading, I bring that up not to spouse my own virtue or stroke my ego, but for the sake of transparency, as well as to make it clear that I do not have a vested financial interest in the group getting donations. While none of the positions get paid very much in the grand scheme of things, while I don't feel comfortable listing the exact rates most of the staff get paid between $0.10 and $0.20 per page, this payment helps us recruit more talented members and allows us to maintain a fairly high standard of quality as far as fan TL goes. In an ideal world that payment could be sourced entirely from good will donations from our readers with no further incentive or benefit other than allowing us to keep working as we are now, but the world we live in is far from ideal. The reality is that people simply don't donate that much if there is literally no incentive to do so. I can say with certainty that the group leader isn't trying to squeeze our reader base for as much profit as possible, this isn't some underhanded trade of integrity for money, its simply a lot more reasonable to provide the absolute minimum possible incentive in exchange for financial support if we want to receive any.


we are not selling exclusive chapters or extras, we are not locking any exclusive content behind a paywall nor are we trying to monetize your screen by begging you to use our site that we plaster with ads. the only tangible benefit you get from giving us money is access to chapters as soon as they are finished, those chapters are uploaded to mangadex on a set schedule, and that schedule is about as fast as we think we can have chapters done consistently, we don't have an archive of chapters backlogged just sitting around or anything. In my opinion its the least possible scummy donation incentive or method of recouping our losses. As I said previously, the group isn't being run for profit, but we also cant simply eat the costs entirely on our own, and the pure kindness of strangers is insufficient to cover it.


as for the legal argument, it would cost a publisher quite literally thousands of times more to litigate such a case than they could possibly get from a fan TL group, which is why none of them ever do, at most you get a cease and desist letter, which tends to be enough to stop a fan TL group. As for them being more likely to send such a cease and desist letter, I don't think our patreon has any kind of impact on that. what actually matters to the publisher is any potential damage we would cause to their sales, so if they aren't selling or planning on selling an official English localization, then the sales impact of a fan TL is laughably negligible, its quite literally not worth the time it would take a publisher to find, figure out how to contact, and then send letters to fan TL groups who don't directly step on their toes.


TL;DR: Yes selling inconsistent early access to chapters is marginally more scummy than simply praying for donations. But at some point Ideals have to compromise with reality, and the reality is that donations alone cant cover the cost of even a very modestly paid staff. In my opinion this is by far the least scummy possible way to incentivize donations/recoup at least some of our losses.

I understand that this translation group you work with pays their staff. That's nice of them, but completely unnecessary. If a fan translation group requires "staff" which requires "payment" it isn't a fan translation group, it is a business with staff. That goes from slightly illegal unauthorized sharing of copyright material to absolutely illegal usage of copyright material by a business entity for profit (how much profit only matters in the determination of damages, not the intensity of legality).
This particular group of yours, can't speak of the others, but this one is quite literally saying: pay us for a product. The only way this could be done worse is if the group were claiming to be the "creator" of the manga, which another very new group is actually doing in their cover page - though I seriously doubt that they understand what the words they are using imply...

I cannot speak for the others, but I personally will not use a group's personal website or other funding based means of distribution. Should the group merely suggest their website on a page or a few of their translations I might even suggest others utilize it (assuming they check the content of the Ads on their site), but I personally refuse to do so. Instead, if a group stops hosting here and demands I utilize a means by which they get money, I will go out of my way to "steal" it by reading from aggregator websites (utilizing AdBlock of course, I won't support them either). And for those groups I strongly suggest everyone do the same.
Some groups advertised that they "fix" their chapters, and that obviously the aggregator websites don't upload the fixed chapters, to which I respond "so, this, the originally uploaded, quality is the best you can do, huh?"

As a final aside, and of note - while I certainly hope that this does not - I do not care if the following gets me banned for I feel this is absolutely necessary, I have (briefly) reviewed the Terms of Use of both Ko-fi and Patreon. Neither allow their users to profit, in any way, from copyright material they do not specify own. I also briefly reviewed "International Copyright Law" and we do have (at least) one such "treaty" with Japan so their copyright is applicable in the US and other similar countries that hold such treaties. This is important because BOTH Patreon and Ko-fi do not require request nor demand from the actual copyright holder to take action.
So, yeah, you are correct that taking direct litigation is more costly than (generally) beneficial for most publishers or content creators. But they don't have to take direct nor litigatory action. They can simply notify the appropriate locations and have everything about the group effectively shutdown. If it's egregious enough they can request the email address(es) of the user(s) involved with whatever external entity the offending group uses to further track and shutdown the group. A subpoena is not required for this identifiable information (bank account? Sure. Email address, not so much, depends on what the particular business is willing to provide)
The above is not meant to be taken as a threat. I'm merely informing you, and therefore this particular translation group, that the lack of legal attention doesn't mean the group is safe from consequences. The entities the group utilizes do not have to be COMPELLED to take action. The two I mentioned alone both state in their TOS that they will take action if they are president with (sufficient) evidence. All the publisher, Mangaka, or "concerned citizens" would really have to do is point to this website, the mangas translated by the group and any uploaded page showing the link to that particular Business's site.
Again, I recognize that the above could be taken as a threat. It is not. I'm providing facts to counter your argument about what a publisher/content creator could do.

 

[Galihsky]

So this is what they mean with "God will watch your every step."

That's why the god come to the wedding as witness. That's make sense.

 

[Xlis1]

I understand that this translation group you work with pays their staff. That's nice of them, but completely unnecessary. If a fan translation group requires "staff" which requires "payment" it isn't a fan translation group, it is a business with staff. That goes from slightly illegal unauthorized sharing of copyright material to absolutely illegal usage of copyright material by a business entity for profit (how much profit only matters in the determination of damages, not the intensity of legality).
This particular group of yours, can't speak of the others, but this one is quite literally saying: pay us for a product. The only way this could be done worse is if the group were claiming to be the "creator" of the manga, which another very new group is actually doing in their cover page - though I seriously doubt that they understand what the words they are using imply...

I cannot speak for the others, but I personally will not use a group's personal website or other funding based means of distribution. Should the group merely suggest their website on a page or a few of their translations I might even suggest others utilize it (assuming they check the content of the Ads on their site), but I personally refuse to do so. Instead, if a group stops hosting here and demands I utilize a means by which they get money, I will go out of my way to "steal" it by reading from aggregator websites (utilizing AdBlock of course, I won't support them either). And for those groups I strongly suggest everyone do the same.
Some groups advertised that they "fix" their chapters, and that obviously the aggregator websites don't upload the fixed chapters, to which I respond "so, this, the originally uploaded, quality is the best you can do, huh?"

As a final aside, and of note - while I certainly hope that this does not - I do not care if the following gets me banned for I feel this is absolutely necessary, I have (briefly) reviewed the Terms of Use of both Ko-fi and Patreon. Neither allow their users to profit, in any way, from copyright material they do not specify own. I also briefly reviewed "International Copyright Law" and we do have (at least) one such "treaty" with Japan so their copyright is applicable in the US and other similar countries that hold such treaties. This is important because BOTH Patreon and Ko-fi do not require request nor demand from the actual copyright holder to take action.
So, yeah, you are correct that taking direct litigation is more costly than (generally) beneficial for most publishers or content creators. But they don't have to take direct nor litigatory action. They can simply notify the appropriate locations and have everything about the group effectively shutdown. If it's egregious enough they can request the email address(es) of the user(s) involved with whatever external entity the offending group uses to further track and shutdown the group. A subpoena is not required for this identifiable information (bank account? Sure. Email address, not so much, depends on what the particular business is willing to provide)
The above is not meant to be taken as a threat. I'm merely informing you, and therefore this particular translation group, that the lack of legal attention doesn't mean the group is safe from consequences. The entities the group utilizes do not have to be COMPELLED to take action. The two I mentioned alone both state in their TOS that they will take action if they are president with (sufficient) evidence. All the publisher, Mangaka, or "concerned citizens" would really have to do is point to this website, the mangas translated by the group and any uploaded page showing the link to that particular Business's site.
Again, I recognize that the above could be taken as a threat. It is not. I'm providing facts to counter your argument about what a publisher/content creator could do.

im in no way making a legal defense of fan TL in any way, I'm fully aware of the legality or lack there of as well as the fact that should someone decide it was truly worth their time they could fuck over a fan TL group pretty easily. I'm also making no claim of rightful ownership over any manga, fan TL is piracy with extra steps I'm not stupid enough to not see that. the reason i brought up the potential consequences of participating in fan TL was because some people were insinuating that by having a patreon we were somehow significantly increasing the odds of getting struck down by a publisher, it was specifically compared to how other groups will sometimes ask people to not repost their translations on social media. but to having your translations posted on a big "shoujo manhwa" instagram page or whatever and simply having a patreon are several magnitudes different in terms of the increased odds of getting smitten from on high by the whims of a publisher and or patreon itself.

I also feel the need to restate, we only upload to mangadex and patreon, the versions on patreon are the exact same as the ones on mangadex, we dont have a website nor do we participate in any of the other business practices you talked about. all we are offering is early access as soon as the chapters are finished rather than a set amount of time before they are posted on mangadex. I also fundamentally disagree with the characterization of the group as a for profit business, at most id classify it as a non profit organization.

 

[Xlis1]

Feel like the main point though is that the group is hard capping how many chapters they let out to the public while locking however many behind a paywall for however long it takes the 3 "chapters" a month amount to slowly trickle out.


There's multiple ways to handle patreon stuff without it feeling that crappy imo. Like having a grace period after something is done being translated like 3-7 days where patrons or what have you can read it early before it get's uploaded, then the patrons get to feel special and people here aren't as peeved after reading the end card which sounds a lot better saying you get a couple days early access to completed chapter than essentially saying "buy into our patreon to get access to these chapters we're technically withholding for the sake of making money for 1-2 months". (Especially series like this that have their chapters cut into 3 parts in the raws which means we're sitting on 1 complete chapter a month based on the written amount uploaded)


Advertising that there's at least 2 complete fan translated chapters locked behind a patreon paywall while mangadex gets three 1/3rd sized chapters a month was always going to be met with some disdain from the readers here

Was just about to comment the same.
While I get ya have to pay the staff and all other jazz such as raws. there's soo many less scummy ways to go about it, at the end of the day it jus boils down to withholding chapters on patreon. The justification used jus isn't good enough

so what your objecting to is not the fact that we are asking for donations, nor the fact that offering early access to patrons, but you have a problem with the fact that we dont have a fixed early access period? If thats the case im sure nanu would be willing to change the policy. I dont see why it makes a difference personally but if thats what people want thats fine. if what your taking issue with is rather the fact that it was explicitly stated how many chapters we were ahead of schedule then we can change our end cards to not specify that.

Also just to be clear, we aren't artificially lowering our release rate or anything, its actually fairly unusual to be more than 1 chapter ahead of schedule at any given time. our release schedule is set to be as fast as we are confident we can have the chapters done by consistently, sometimes people have more or less time to work, so we have to average it out to ensure a steady flow of content gets put out.

If you can explain exactly what you dislike about how we are doing things currently and how you would prefer them to be done I'll do my best to have those changes made going forwards so long as it still lets us pay our staff.

 

[Aricitic]

im in no way making a legal defense of fan TL in any way, I'm fully aware of the legality or lack there of as well as the fact that should someone decide it was truly worth their time they could fuck over a fan TL group pretty easily. I'm also making no claim of rightful ownership over any manga, fan TL is piracy with extra steps I'm not stupid enough to not see that. the reason i brought up the potential consequences of participating in fan TL was because some people were insinuating that by having a patreon we were somehow significantly increasing the odds of getting struck down by a publisher, it was specifically compared to how other groups will sometimes ask people to not repost their translations on social media. but to me having your translations posted on a big "shoujo manhwa" instagram page or whatever and simply having a patreon are several magnitudes different in terms of the increased odds of getting smitten from on high by the whims of a publisher and or patreon itself.

I also feel the need to restate, we only upload to mangadex and patreon, the versions on patreon are the exact same as the ones on mangadex, we dont have a website nor do we participate in any of the other business practices you talked about. all we are offering is early access as soon as the chapters are finished rather than a set amount of time before they are posted on mangadex. I also fundamentally disagree with the characterization of the group as a for profit business, at most id classify it as a non profit organization.

I will respond to this and then drop it as I see no reason to argue further.
I agree almost entirely with your first paragraph (almost in it's entirety).
But I must disagree with your second paragraph. While the group certainly cannot be classified as "for profit" in any sense, unless someone keeps any "left over" money, it can still easily be classified as a business. The group has a product and is asking for money to receive said product. The product is the withheld edited characters, the payment is to the Patreon page.
No, it doesn't matter that this product is given for free after a certain amount of time. Plenty of business provide one or more of their "for sale" products for free after a given time. An example, if so required, is Panera Bread, who gives their "for sale" bread and pastries to homeless shelters and other such entities at the end of each day. I would present other examples but am on a phone, limiting my ability to research... And I really don't want to spam a wall of text...
The issue at hand is the "pay us and get something" and the 'something' is the issue.

The second part that makes this group a business is that the "employees" receive compensation on the form of money, or monetary gain. If they did it for free and were not paid by, what is effectively, a (very) "part time" employer, then it would be less liable to be considered a business.

But even then it isn't so much that I have a problem with the "group members" getting paid. It's that the group is basically saying "buy our advance chapters, so we can pay our" [employees].
If it was "donate", I wouldn't have a problem. But it isn't, it's "buy from us".

Finally, I feel that I must say, back when bato.to was it's former thing I took issue with the reaction to an individual who found the translation for a number of characters of a particular manga, found, edited, typeset, etc, those translations into the chapters and uploaded them. They did NOT receive permission from the translator to do so, but made it clear in each chapter that they had tried to find and contact them.
They were COMPLETELY and ABSOLUTELY demonized by the majority of the community. Why? What had they done so wrong to receive such treatment? Well, stolen and uploaded without permission of course... The irony, the absurdity of it all.
Unlike the person who uploaded their translation to what was very clearly an insecure location, the individual who uploaded to Baton.to at least attempted to get permission. Yes, they ultimately FAILED to do so, but it was no less illegal or ultimately wrong than the translator; in fact I would argue it was less wrong. The translator should have emailed their translation to the person who requested and/or paid for it, not posted it to an insecure location that practically anyone had access to (translating alone is not illegal, hosting it publicly for anyone to access it is. Translating for an individual's singular consultation is fair game.)

My problem is the idea of inherent rights to what people very clearly have absolutely no right to what-so-ever. It's the idea, or outright statement of "I own this and can do whatever I want with it" when they very clearly don't.
To a lesser degree I am also bothered by people using images and not CREDITING the image.

There, I'm done. I'm sorry for the walls of text. I would spoiler some of it to make this smaller, but, again, on a phone...

 

[IonDrako]

If you can explain exactly what you dislike about how we are doing things currently and how you would prefer them to be done I'll do my best to have those changes made going forwards so long as it still lets us pay our staff.

To point out a couple things that come from my personal opinion on it

First listing how many chapter are already done and sitting in patreon time purgatory was a mistake for sure many free readers reading that a fan translation group has more chapters sitting behind a paywall on patreon would react negatively.

Second listing that the group is uploading on a set 3 per month limit despite translating faster wasn't going to be taken great by people since stuff like that isn't usually done (or at least said) on the fan translation side of things. Translators, usually at their own pace, catch up to raws and then release weekly or monthly depending on the raw's release schedule. Obviously it's much better on the readers side if releases aren't based on the groups decided public release schedule (while translating faster) rather than a schedule the group is pushing for to catch up to raws. Listing it in the end card was a mistake as people wouldn't have known that was being done without it being said (while I'd prefer it wasn't done, it being said was the main mistake there).

And yeah the problem wasn't ever that the group makes money from patreon, many/most groups do it (some along side the ad filled sites) it was that instead of some grace period for the patrons to early access complete chapters it's a back log of completed chapters that are sitting there so the group can slowly release it's decided set amount per month. For the public readers it means much longer periods to catch up to raws on series that are behind by a decent bit of time. (like the chapter 10 stuff for this series despite being done it won't be seen till next month purely for what seems to be money generation)

Honestly though just as a pr thing if it was just said "Join our patreon to get early access to chapters" there basically wouldn't have been backlash and the current system wouldn't have been something people were criticizing since they wouldn't have known, it's one of those situations where being open about how the group was doing it was going to cause some to get angry about it. People will probably forget if it's not mentioned again though I'd prefer the early access, faster catch up to raws system more. But yeah the way it's listed is kinda like the groups that do the "We have more chapters uploaded on our site, read them there first" when they upload here but instead of being a site it's locked behind a patreon paywall which rubs a lot of people bad.

 

[Xlis1]

To point out a couple things that come from my personal opinion on it

First listing how many chapter are already done and sitting in patreon time purgatory was a mistake for sure many free readers reading that a fan translation group has more chapters sitting behind a paywall on patreon would react negatively.

Second listing that the group is uploading on a set 3 per month limit despite translating faster wasn't going to be taken great by people since stuff like that isn't usually done (or at least said) on the fan translation side of things. Translators, usually at their own pace, catch up to raws and then release weekly or monthly depending on the raw's release schedule. Obviously it's much better on the readers side if releases aren't based on the groups decided public release schedule (while translating faster) rather than a schedule the group is pushing for to catch up to raws. Listing it in the end card was a mistake as people wouldn't have known that was being done without it being said (while I'd prefer it wasn't done, it being said was the main mistake there).

And yeah the problem wasn't ever that the group makes money from patreon, many/most groups do it (some along side the ad filled sites) it was that instead of some grace period for the patrons to early access complete chapters it's a back log of completed chapters that are sitting there so the group can slowly release it's decided set amount per month. For the public readers it means much longer periods to catch up to raws on series that are behind by a decent bit of time. (like the chapter 10 stuff for this series despite being done it won't be seen till next month purely for what seems to be money generation)

Honestly though just as a pr thing if it was just said "Join our patreon to get early access to chapters" there basically wouldn't have been backlash and the current system wouldn't have been something people were criticizing since they wouldn't have known, it's one of those situations where being open about how the group was doing it was going to cause some to get angry about it. People will probably forget if it's not mentioned again though I'd prefer the early access, faster catch up to raws system more. But yeah the way it's listed is kinda like the groups that do the "We have more chapters uploaded on our site, read them there first" when they upload here but instead of being a site it's locked behind a patreon paywall which rubs a lot of people bad.

Understandable, thank you for your feedback, we will revise our group pages for all chapters of our series going forwards, we will leave this chapter as it is, I feel like if we changed it at this point it might be taken as us trying to hide something or retroactively invalidate the fair (and very politely worded <3) criticism that we got in this thread.

and just for the record we have a fixed release schedule (3 chapters a month for this series) because we see value in the reliability of being able to expect 3 chapters every month consistently, not to entice people to buy early access, although I do admit that that is a byproduct of doing so and I couldn't blame anyone for interpreting it that way. i work with a lot of groups, and i know releases are done in a multitude of different ways/schedules, some post 10 chapters in a single day then upload nothing for a month or so, some post sporadically a few times every week, and I think everyone on this site has read at least one series where the TL group was posting fairly regularly and then without notice or warning just vanishes off the face of the earth, never to be seen again. we want to be able to guarantee that every week and a half or so you will get a chapter of this manga without fail, regardless of if our staff are super busy that week or if they had the entire week free to do whatever, which is why the current system exists as it is, and that's also why our early access doesn't have a fixed period, its simply done when its done, and sometimes that means its a month early, sometimes its 5 minutes early.


Thank you again for your very fair and polite feedback, as well as taking the time to help us improve. <3