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?​

 

[Carn109]

Thanks for putting this thread together
its been an interesting read

 

[prussianbluehedgehog]

Thank you, very interesting read.

I have some objections to 3.2 ("Don't bother with trying to run a website"). Yes, running a site on the same scale as mangadex would be very expensive. But for a scanlator group seeking to host their work only, probably will not be that bad. Storage and domain is dirt cheap. No problem there (which I think you acknowledged). Database, server, if you don't do anything stupid it should be dirt cheap too. Bandwidth... well, Hetzner charges 1 EUR per TB, as an example (iirc Hetzner requires KYC, but you see the point). Don't serve images to clients that are part of DDOS attacks and costs should be reasonable, again especially for the work of a single group. Website design "cost" shouldn't even be mentioned.

So most people can probably afford to run one, just as a hobby. Then if you assume ad revenue, and donations...

You have a good point about it attracting the wrong kind of attention. But nowadays you can pay for VPS and domain names with crypto. So worst case they take something down, you just take a day or two and change domain names and servers. Anna's archive seems to be doing well on this model, but they have very very good OPSEC. If you mess up somewhere you can end up like the comick guy, or much worse, the bato guy.

Furthermore, the mangadex DMCA takedowns have made it clear that we (readers and scanlators) cannot just rely on mangadex, nice as it is. Complying may have been the best decision for them, but it was a disaster for everyone else. If it was not for the aggregator sites scraping mangadex, a lot of work would've been lost. Now we must check a checkbox that we have permission, when uploading. I'm sure the mangadex team knows that the majority of the uploads would not fulfill the criteria. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say anything further about that here.

Now veering off that topic, obviously this is a cat-and-mouse game. How do we move beyond mangadex and co, which are vulnerable to being taken down, and endanger the operators? I can think of two ways.

1. What we have now, except as Tor onionsites. Now, the operator is pretty much anonymous, so you can even just run it on a homeserver, unless some Russia/USA/UK/Israel-level state really really wants to get you, even more than they want to get terrorists and CP distributors. Tor can be blocked, but blocking is much harder than blocking normal websites. Downside is slower load times. Also, very few people use Tor, so there needs to be some kind of awareness campaign (in other words, this will be very difficult). I think this is a good thing to do parallel to the regular clearnet websites (offer both an onionsite and a clearnet site).

2. Host all the images as torrents, or other distributed P2P schemes like IPFS/Freenet/etc. That way other people can contribute their bandwidth, and even if the original operator gets shut down, it can continue. Now all you need is something like mangadex interface, but it is actually just a torrent tracker. That torrent tracker metadata itself can be distributed P2P too. So anyone can operate a frontend. And operating just the frontend would be legal in some jurisdictions (or so someone on the internet said). I actually saw one manga site use IPFS already... so maybe this is the way things are headed.

 

[prussianbluehedgehog]

That said, I did do a bit of digging on what mangaka typically make... and it's not a rosy picture at all.
https://anime.stackexchange.com/que...angaka-profit-from-anime-or-merchandise-sales

To summarize, a new mangaka typically gets about $500 per chapter (full-length, at least 20 pages), and then about 10%-15% in royalties from sales, which amounts to about $0.50 per tankoubon sold. If their manga is successful enough to get an anime adaptation, then they can expect to get about $650 per episode, which on a full single-cour season, can net them $8000... However, they don't get a royalty cut because that money all goes to the sponsors and publishers.

And wow, that's both disgusting and explains a lot about the poor mangakas... It's good to see some using pixiv or other platforms for a slightly more direct way to distribute their work.

It seems like all the creatives in that industry (and really, all industries) are getting fucked over. Here's an article about (English) manga letterers:

Linsley added, “The pay is so low that letterers have to overload themselves. I had to stop lettering as my main source of income because I was working 70-hour weeks just to make an average income with no benefits.”

The internet has made the situation a little better in terms of cutting out middlemen, but I doubt we'll see copyright reform (reduction) in our lifetimes, which would be the very first step.

 

[Bentoki]

 

[Manko-sensei]

Woha, what an intellectual, you're just the second in this thread sharing that meme!

 

[BakedBanana]

After reading STOP! PIRACY I'm in total agreement with whatever you said OP.

 

[AzrefReza]

So, coming after the war, but I had a couple thoughts of my own…

1.) The Basics of Licensing

Not gonna get into too much detail here, but your whole presentation tends to be rather US-oriented. There are broadly two approaches to intellectual property rights : copyright, mainly used in common law countries, and authors’ rights, used pretty much everywhere else. These two approaches tend to blend together, mainly due to international treatises like the Bern Convention, but they remain fundamentally opposed : authors’ rights protect the creators (hence the notions of moral rights and neighboring rights which are mostly absent in common law countries), while copyright protects the revenues.

And I feel it’s important when discussing matters of intellectual property to keep in mind which approach is used in the legal system of the country from which the protected work stems. Case in point, Japan is an authors’ rights country, which means that reasoning in terms of US-style copyright is risky at best.

But here's the caveat: It is completely up to the publisher that holds that copyright to pursue cases of infringement. And while only the protections under the applicable treaties applies, legal action in and of itself can only be applied under the laws of the country in which the person committing the infringement resides.

For instance, this can be extremely misleading. I do not know how Japanese law works on this specific matter, but to give an example I am more familiar with (and to oversimplify), under French law, copyright infringement is a felony, which means our equivalent of the DA can take legal action without the need for the authors’ rights’ holder to lift a finger.

And French penal law is extraterritorial as long as the victim is French or France-based and the act was committed on the Internet, meaning you can get prosecuted as long as the rights of some French actor are somehow involved: stupid example, but if you use a copy of the French official version of a manga to do your Russian scanlation, you can be prosecuted for infringing on the rights of the French translator.

On the other hand, it is important to remember that your country’s laws apply even when you’re using material from a more permissive country. For instance, English-language Wikipedia can show strongly size-reduced versions of the cover of books, because it falls under Fair Use, whereas the French-language Wikipedia has no such thing, because there is no Fair Use in French law, and so it would be copyright infringement (yes, I know, it’s stupid).

This is why copyright strikes against Mangadex are done under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of the USA - MD is mostly operated by residents of the USA, so legal action typically takes place under the USA's judicial system.

Once again, the matter is not that simple. DMCA only applies to platforms and service providers operating in the USA, regardless of where the people operating them reside. Mangadex Inc is a US legal entity targeting (among others) US residents, so they have to comply to DMCA. But, and even if they are not necessarily aware of it, since they also target EU residents, they should be complying to article 17 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market which mandates proactive measures against copyright infringement.

Also, there are “paralegal” ways to crack down on copyright infringement, especially within US law (they looove their extraterritoriality, damn wankers…): if the platform itself is out of reach of the DMCA, then maybe the legal entity providing the storage or the domain name for the platform isn’t. Or last resort, the financial platform by which the money to fund the platform transits is probably American (you talked about this a bit in the section about self-hosting).

TL;DR: International law is muddy, especially regarding what happens on the Internet, so it’s better to assume you are not safe.

3.1.) I feel that no one should be accepting payment or donations - none whatsoever - for fansubbing or scanslation.

I have a more “real politic” approach here: scanlation is piracy. Be it for profit or completely disinterested, it’s still piracy. You are doing something illegal, and from a practical standpoint, the only thing that matters is: how much are you ready to lose to do this illegal thing?

My personal view on the matter is that pirates should lay low, aim to be as anonymous and invisible as possible, and consequently, not seek any monetary gratification nor fame, recognition, or whatsoever. Credit pages and watermarks are, for me, the epitome of stupidity. At least until you encounter groups trepanned enough to paywall chapters on their own website…

But then again, each person has their own profit/cost balance, and if you are ready to face several years in prison (or whatever the sentence is in your country) in order to make a few dozen dollars on the translation of some generic big tiddy isekai harem slop, then you do you…

3.2.) Furthermore, I will also state my opinion on the idea of running a website outside of Mangadex. It is idiotic and foolhardy. And I will state why.

Running your very own pirate flagship is indeed utterly stupid. On the other hand, Mangadex cannot be trusted and should not be trusted for long term conservation of the scanlations, so dispersing your work on a variety of hosting platforms, some of them low visibility and with little entry requirements, seems like a pretty good idea. It can be something really simple like an anonymous upload on Imgur, some random static GitHub site, etc.

3.4.) Furthermore, and to be quite frank, the entire business model is trash. On both ends.

I happen to be a published author IRL. Not fiction, some “smart” book, and I’m one of several co-authors, so it’s not perfectly equivalent, but to give you an idea, as of yet, my book has sold around 1100 copies, which is quite decent for the French market. I have earned a total of roughly 85 € on all these sales. The publishing world is indeed complete trash. Which is why I have zero moral qualm about translating mass produced entertainment to languages for which the original creators have no interest whatsoever. Just give adequate attribution, and sail on, yoho!