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

[deleted-user-7d07f52915]

Here is the solution everyone overlooks:
The DMCA is a US law. Host the site outside of the USA and tell everyone who submits DMCA complaints to fuck off.

Surely the Koreans/Kakao and Japanese/Yakuza will just bribe the local authorities to do something about it.

Anyways, as I said before, if it’s true the one behind this are Kakao, it’s suspicious that Asura and other sketchy manhwa scanlators aren’t DMCA’d to death. They literally keep scanning new Kakao manhwas.

I personally think this is bigger than mangas, manhwas and light novels. Libgen is dead. Annas and z-library seem to be under attack too. A bunch of streaming sites went offline too.

 

[Angry_Panda]

I personally think this is bigger than mangas, manhwas and light novels. Libgen is dead. Annas and z-library seem to be under attack too. A bunch of streaming sites went offline too.

There seems to be an increased appetite recently for these crackdowns across a lot of media. I've seen notices about several sports re-streamers getting knocked out recently as well. Kind of wondering if some of this is market saturation 'forcing' various platforms to start chasing these down if they want to keep the line going up (or, at least the folks in the C-suite are interpreting it that way).

 

[Bireus]

Kind of wondering if some of this is market saturation 'forcing' various platforms to start chasing these down if they want to keep the line going up (or, at least the folks in the C-suite are interpreting it that way).

Gotta kill the competition so you can monopolize the market to your liking.

 

[Koneko_Nyaa]

Anyways, as I said before, if it’s true the one behind this are Kakao, it’s suspicious that Asura and other sketchy manhwa scanlators aren’t DMCA’d to death. They literally keep scanning new Kakao manhwas.

They are, but they have ways of outmaneuvering copyright trolls.

I have seen:

• Random digits added to URLs that frequently change. It'll break your bookmarks and neglected tabs, but the offending URLs will be "Not Found" by the time the DMCA complaint arrives. The Manhwa is still there, but the address has changed.
• Hopping to a new TLD. (e.g example.org -> example.com -> example.net -> example.wtf) The entire offending site hops to a new address.
• Full rebrand. The group "disbands" or "permanently shuts down" their site only to reappear under another name. The readers quickly spread word amongst themselves, but the complainant has to start the whole process over from scratch.
• The Pirate Bay model: Not actually "hosting" offending content, but indirectly facilitating access. The front-end site where the users go hosts only the reader app for 'other people's content found online' while the offending images are served by another server that is supposedly run by a third party and employs the above tricks to stay ahead of complaints.
• Hosting in another jurisdiction, not giving a fuck, and only resorting to the above fuckery when the copyright troll actually manages to track down and win a court battle against your web host or registrar to force your service provider to terminate your service. There are service providers out there who are very anti-censorship, will take on the most difficult clients, and make it a nightmare for anyone trying to get you cancelled to jump through all the hoops to make it happen.

If you make it very difficult and expensive to take you down, only to be reborn right away if they actually succeed, it will not be financially viable for them to keep trying. DMCA works here because MangaDex chose compliance as the path of least resistance to keeping their service online.
I'll add that other sites that generate revenue from ads have an additional financial incentive to invest the time and effort to resist DMCA that doesn't exist here.

Edit: Typos. Apparently, I originally wrote this at 3:13 AM while half asleep.

 

[handyhippie65]

c*mick went down a few days ago. it still had a lot of manga that got yeeted from here posted/linked to, and i guess rather than go through what MD did they just shut the entire site down never to rise again or so they claim. this will all come back to bite these publishers on the ass. the global popularity rise was directly caused by fan scanlators on sites like MD and c*mick translating it into other languages for the love of the work. without them, that popularity will drop like a stone down a well.

 

[deleted-user-7d07f52915]

They are, but they have ways of outmaneuvering copyright trolls.

Oh come on. Regular DMCA, takedowns, and closing their discords will kill these sites. They won’t have any readers soon enough if they kept changing the URL. No readers mean no money.

The whole thing stinks.

 

[panzerkampfwagyu]

Oh come on. Regular DMCA, takedowns, and closing their discords will kill these sites. They won’t have any readers soon enough if they kept changing the URL. No readers mean no money.

The whole thing stinks.

Lawfare is pretty slow though, so the siteowners have an advantage in that.
The lawyer is also gonna bill them for every change, so they have to do a cost benefit analysis

 

[Anamee]

Be careful sharing md links too.
I got hit for one link to a manga that has no English publication or plans for one because it's too fked up and old. It'snot even published anywhere anymore. The only connection I found is one of the other works written by the author having an official Korean translation. It was around this mess went down.

I think the site itself being listed as an offender means sharing links for legal works can be problematic.