Questions about legality as a new translator.

[MacedonScans]

[I only translate Chinese manhua, so this post pertains to Chinese/international copyright law]

Are scanlations as a whole legal? On some forums I’ve googled, people are saying that there’s a gray area in the law while in others, they say it’s completely illegal.

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Will I be safe if I don’t have a website? Like let’s say the original author or publisher found out about my scanlations. Would the worst case scenario be that they contact the owners of mangadex to take them down, and then I move on to translating a different series, or would they pursue legal action against me even after the mangadex admins take them down?

As a whole, do scanlators get legally punished often? Based on what I’ve seen, they usually get off easy. The author or their lawyer might contact them to take down the translations, the sites might take them down, etc. But how often is it that publishers take less benevolent approaches and sue or do other things?

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I’d overall like to know what kind of legal action might be taken against me, if any, and how likely, and what steps I can take to lessen the likelihood. I’d also like to know how contacting authors to be approved for an unofficial translation works.

 

[Richman]

@MacedonScans I'm new to reading scans as a whole and also i'm not a lawyer by any definition, so there are plenty things i don't understand.

Once something gets published on the internet and spreads, it becomes impossible to remove completely, so the closest thing companies and IP holders can do is send a DMCA so the person who's infringing the law stops their progress and distribution of the product.

An example of this would be the fan game Another Metroid 2 Remake, whose development stopped after Nintendo sent a DMCA to the devs so they removed all of their download links and eventually sent another DMCA to stop any and all progress (which totally didn't have to do at all with the release of their own M2 remake, Samus Returns /S). Same thing with many ROM downloading sites, especially those that had Nintendo game ROMs, because Nintendo made those sites remove the download links for their games and now it is a little harder to find ROMs for their old systems (not impossible, obviously).

I guess a similar thing could happen with scanlations, the way i see it, scans are not exactly legal, all publishers and authors can do is enforce their rights to their IPs and make the scanlators stop translating and distributing their works, i think this type of situation has already happened to multiple scan groups and scan websites, i think something like this happened to MD not so long ago, i remember the site having to change hosts? Something like that.

I don't know the exact legality of scans, but i think they're illegal because you're taking the work of another person and distributing it without their permission (there are authors that allow translations, so it's not always like this) for free, and, even though most scan groups do this for free, some accept donations (mostly to buy the raws for translating) but i would see that as a way to profit slightly, of course, i am no scanlator, i have no group or skills and i'm merely a reader, so i can't speak about how groups work and how they manage themselves.

It's a risk you have to take when you do anything with the work of someone else, it happens a lot on YouTube when, for example, you use music in a small section of a 30 minute video and the some company claims the musico so the entire video is demonetized.

To everyone else, feel free to correct me and say where i'm wrong.