The Ethics of Scanslation

[BlackAeronaut]

Well, I did call it a "treatise" for a reason. Did you think I was just messing around by dropping that particular word in the title?

 

[Angry_Panda]

Sell-Off only really applies to the publisher.

Right - as long as the product is out of the original licensee's warehouse by sell-off date, they're good. I think we're saying the same thing here.

[If one was inclined to be slick, one could try to create a legally distinct but wholly controlled entity to purchase any remainders from the licensee and essentially sidestep this limitation, but I would guess I'm not the first person to come up with this idea and it's prohibited in one way or another.]

This all coincided with the burst of the Dot-Com Bubble that built up in the mid-to-late 1990's, and then popped early-on in the year 2000.

The particular meltdown I'm thinking of was later than the dot-com bubble. The anime/manga market in the US (which is all I can speak to first-hand) got oversaturated in the mid '00's, and a number of companies over-extended themselves. When the mortgage bubble popped and rippled out in late '07/early '08, the market pulled back, and ADV was one of the more prominent casualties of that. I'm thinking the sudden loss of many willing partners on this side of the Pacific, coupled with the increasing expansion of the underground channels as broadband internet continued to make inroads, drew the Japanese publishers' attention to the 'problem' in a way that it hadn't been before. Clearly it didn't bring their full wrath down, but it at least got it on everyone's radar.

(They knew about it before this, of course - go watch 'Battle Programmer Shirase' from 2003 for an early industry acknowledgement of the Western audiences watching fansubs.)

--

I am curious to see how Sony plays things - they have a considerable amount of potential integration (and very deep pockets) at their disposal, so if/when they actually get their act together and start taking advantage of it, they may be able to set up a model that gets emulated elsewhere. Or maybe not. I'm also curious if the Japanese publishers are going to continue to let the Koreans take the lead chasing DMCAs across the globe and just ride on their coattails for a while longer.

 

[BlackAeronaut]

[If one was inclined to be slick, one could try to create a legally distinct but wholly controlled entity to purchase any remainders from the licensee and essentially sidestep this limitation, but I would guess I'm not the first person to come up with this idea and it's prohibited in one way or another.]

That could be a thing, though. A retailer that buys up the older and less popular stock of other retailers at a wholesale price, and then selling it at a discount.

If anyone reading this knows of a retailer that does this, please do say something.

 

[Manko-sensei]

There are some things I didn't mention yesterday, two of them are the following:

Exportation of anime first and manga related material later was initiated and pushed by foreign countries. Japan publishers/studios accept offers but are uninterested in foreign customers when creating media. They focus entirely on their local market, both for marketing-sales decisions and content. They can translate titles for some works as they're published for the first time, but that's mostly a form of advertisement to differentiate titles in a magazine. But this form of operating makes licensing more diverse than the only method exposed in this thread: it is far more common selling licenses for a fixed price.​

• Once you move from best-selling titles and current/hot topic titles, the more uncertain the short term profit the less interest there's to correlate foreign sales with their cut. For the Spanish-language market (sales here are only relevant for Spain), that only focuses on printed manga (even if digital versions exist), licenses come with a fixed price and with conditions. These conditions vary from material quality and volume format to other minor titles publishers have to take in order to have that series. This means foreign publishers need to release (normally at a lower pace) series they're uninterested in but are a requirement to own the rights for the best-selling titles of that magazine.​

Everyone must learn who they support by choosing any option. Scanlation (the hobby) exists because there is media that is not available, affordable and/or proper officially translated works. When there are publishers that offer bad quality editions, buying from them returns taxes (unlike scamlation groups) at least, but in the end you're sustaining someone who attracts customers that have nowhere else to go with their current knowledge. However there are as well other publishers (more modest of course) that may offer a similar range of variety (or shorter) but they meet with the quality expected. In this latter case, keeping or starting a scanlation defeats the purpose of scanlation itself, as you're hindering someone who cares for their product and you're simply being redundant (just like when two scanlation groups compete to release a shounen romcom faster than the other). Because if someone meets with the criteria, why wasting time in that series when there are many more who need it?​