"The more you preach [piracy], the more Japanese artists lose faith in the foreign market."

[justforthelulz]

Souryuu, mangaka of several popular titles, including Black Gakkou and MachiMaho, recently posted a tweet here that reignited the debate over piracy.

As MangaDex is one of the largest hubs for (mostly) unofficial scanlations in multiple languages, what are your thoughts on this?

No doubt piracy is stealing, but is Souryuu accusing pirates of stealing from a market that isn't being well-served?
Do you have any examples of official manga translations that were so obviously inferior to fan efforts?
Has anyone really decided as to even go that far in wanting to do to learn Japanese more like so?

How many of you actually spend real money on manga, whether imported or local?
Do you agree that only people who pay can be considered "true fans"? Does paying for it increase your satisfaction or enjoyment?
日本語を話せますか?

 

[pockettrash]

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[Kamikoto]

I buy manga and light novels, but I definitely pirate a lot more than I buy. Although... most of the stuff I pirate these days are Korean webtoons since i don't know Korean. I know Japanese, so I buy manga digitally or read them for free from official sources if available.

 

[Greenfrost]

I do buy official physical copies of manga, generally when a new volume of a series I read comes out. The reason I think fan translations are necessary, is because only a small percentage of manga come out here in the US. So, a lot of the time, it's the only way to read them. I mean, I could try to learn Japanese, but I've always had immense difficulty learning second languages. they were my worst subject back in school. I will only read fan translations for three reasons. If there's no official release, if I wouldn't buy it anyway, or if it's digital. I won't support that medium. So, I say to artists, if you want me to purchase more of your work, then bring more stuff over.

Also, I 100% condemn only reading fan translations, but never buying any officially. Even if you're tight on cash, The volumes are like $10 in the US, and generally come out three months apart. I'm sure you can afford to support one or two of your favorite series.

 

[Blu7]

As a French native speaker and living in Europe, I am lucky to have the opportunity to have access to a very rich market (and also because I can read English and Italian so that is a plus). But as many people here I imagine, I read scans of series which are not published and I am interested in, especially sport mangas (as demonstrated by my avatar 😆). Because they are damned for western markets (even France an Italy stopped release them as they are commercial failures) . Same for slice of life/gag manga.

But it happens to me to buy japanes manga/while having their scans, even though I cannot read japanese (like I will do with series like "Be blues" or "Yugami kun" when COVID19 crisis will be over). That is my modest contribution for helping the author.

I cannot see myself blame people for reading scans. I am just sad of the hypocrisy of people claiming that they read scans because mangas are not available and continue even when they are available. I mean, be honest, scans are free and easy to pick and so you (we) read it. And please please please, stop tweeting to authors with pics of leaks and scans. That is disrespectful and stupid.

 

[Hitspark]

Here is how this thinking works on a practical level.

My friend has purchased a manga. He reads it then gives it to me. I take it and read it, I enjoy it.

I have now committed piracy. I obtained copyrighted material without paying for it.

If my friend continues to give me his old copies then I have no reason to buy them myself and will continue to read his works for free.

Even if we expand this and say I then I give it to my friend and he to his and so on 100 times over, no money is made on that manga. But hardly anyone would call giving your friend manga that you own "Piracy" would they? There's an infinite number of scenarios you can come up with that are comparable to piracy and, in most if not all of them, piracy doesn't seem as bad as people make it out to be. In fact, various studies have shown Piracy ENCOURAGES sales, not deters them. Western countries have started to figure this out, Japan on the other hand has not even noticed it.

 

[LowSanity]

I don't believe that either side is in the right.

What can i say?
In the perfect world without fale advertisement, where i have enough cash and space to buy and store stuff, where everything is available in the place i live and buy them.
I would buy everything i find interesting.

I buy manga in my native. I have seen the inferior official manga translations.
There is so much wrong with first volume of Hellsing that it was hard to read.
Later volumes and versions are fine, sadly i own the first version and it's bad.
BTW my native is Polish.

I don't think piracy is as huge nowadays as back when i was in my teens.
Back then i have seen two unofficial tranlation teams that were printing and selling their translations.
I don't think there's a single place like that nowadays.

If you must then crucify me in this thread but i will use "piracy" as a way to test the product before i buy it.

 

[BzzBzz]

Quality of available (localized) stuff doesn't worth the price that publisher sets for this shit.

Make it properly translated and typesetted if you wanna sell it to me. Currently too many of localized manga are barely readable.

Image quality. Are you fuckin' kidding me? Do you know it's already 2020? 2000 is long past. 80% jpeg 730x1200 is NOT acceptable at this time.

Make it reasonable priced. Situation when you can buy 2 or even 3 paper tanks for the price of single digital is retarded.

Fix this shit then I will consider buying your stuff. Until then I don't give a fuck about how much your butt hurts.



TLR - JP artist shouldn't QQ about fans, they should QQ about shitty localization work of companies that want to make money with no effort at all.

 

[Granitefish]

I buy manga that I really like and want to really help finance, but I don't have the money to buy as much as I want, heck I jut spent 70 bucks buying manga a couple hours ago, and that's just because of a bonus I got.

However, I feel just as important to this discussion is the part in the post regarding people harassing authors who force fan translators to take them down. I believe it's these people who really push authors to not have faith in the foreign market. I completely understand the authors who don't want fan translations out there, and I feel it's their right to say no to it. And the people who harass them for it only make the whole situation worse.

 

[Holo]

I've been to Japan no less than 4 times and each time I have spent plenty of money on the anime/manga industry. Without piracy, I wouldn't have been exposed to anime/manga in the first place, and wouldn't have gone! I would have gone for a 5th time this year (but the coronavirus screwed up that plan)

Poor students don't remain poor forever - once they start earning money, more often than not they will spend money on stuff or even go visit Japan.

 

[xvicarious]

Piracy is almost always a service problem...

https://games.slashdot.org/story/11...be-newell-on-piracy-its-not-a-pricing-problem

Just sayin'

 

[crazybars]

I'm not gonna lie. When I hear Japanese artists complain about piracy and I take a look at the numbers and we make up less than 3% of the Japanese market's Manga sales, where 3% is the TOTAL SALES of EVERY OTHER COUNTRY WORLDWIDE purchases of the Japanese editions of the Manga a year or two ago.

I'm sorry, I can't take it seriously. I'll come back to this thread later. If the artist was complaining about the individual local markets like U.S. or France etc, my answer to the artist have you been there? Each country has it's problems and issues.

Like, I can already write this monstrosity below on our problems here. It's not that simple.

=========Giant blurb on the U.S. Manga problems.

I live in the U.S., I love physical copies. Did you know manga distribution in the U.S. is ABYSMAL? It's a country that is the 4th largest in Landmass in the world, almost the size of China. . . . . with 1/3rd or less the population of China spread out across 2 coasts instead of One coastline. We get almost NO PHYSICAL MANGA if you don't use Amazon, our population density is pretty sparse thanks to our history as a small farmer yokel critter hunting country.

I can cover so much garbage in the U.S. that hinders Manga, like the infamous Amerimanga crash, the Comic industry actively trying to sabotage Manga, which ultimately failed but caused major problems. Plus, the reality of the situation here in America is that Manga and Anime is big along the coasts and the more urban areas, it has almost no distribution or exposure in the wider U.S. itself. due to various reasons. This is why it's still considered niche when it's so big in the U.S. , exposure to it in the U.S. is extremely uneven depending on location. Most Americans (*pre covid 19) were watching movies and Sports.

If that sounds extremely complex and requiring more research than "piracy Bad", that's correct.

 

[Krei]

You know, I wanted to subscribe to the shounen jump digital thing from viz because it was so cheap and I've been reading a lot of stuff from the WSJ. All I got was a "Content not available" message, which is the same for a lot of latin american countries. And sure, I could use a VPN and all but the fact is that the latin american market is almost completely neglected. There are barely any services immediately available for us and only a few select mangas get translated and printed in spanish.

So until that changes piracy will be my best option...

 

[Robosox]

There are always fans that dump their frustration onto artists just because basic statistics of millions of people on the Net and human psychological distribution over cultural and craziness spectrum looking somewhat like Gaussian curves. If someone becomes xenophobic just because of that there is an entirely different problem here.

Also what some Japanese artists think doesn't mean what all of them think, what right do few chosen authors have to represent the entire community?!

And finally piracy by itself solves content accessibility and uncontrolled author's and/or publisher's greed problem. If you can make people sponsor your content even having "unfair competition" in the form of piracy then that means your content itself, its official visibility and delivery to end-users are that good. Authors and publishers shouldn't blame their own incompetency on others.

 

[Yatsuki]

Don't get me wrong, I buy as many manga and anime (also album CDs etc) from both local publishers, JP via proxy store, and US Amazon as I could, but I would still pirate some contents as long as the they put restriction on other regions.

Fun story, I actually tried to sign up for Crunchyroll and Netflix at one point, only to find out CR blocks my country (funimation also) and almost all of the shows I want to watch is region-locked on NF. I barely watched anything on NF because I got sick of the "This show is not available in your region" message after seeing it like at least 50 times?, to the point that after I cancelled my free 30-day subscription, they got back in touch with me to offer me another free subscription lol. I asked their CS and they said since my view hours were so low (less than 2hours on a 30-day subscription) they were willing to offer me another one and this time would be more than happy to help my search for new contents.

Another thing, foreign markets don't get as many stuff as JP (duh). Publishing is still a business, even in JP if a manga doesn't do well, it gets the chop. Naturally that's even tougher on other markets, they won't publish anything that flops in JP even if certain manga would rock in other countries (Stealth Symphony, Mx0 for example). In the case of my local publishers, they have voting polls and most of the stuff getting published in my country right now are either re-publish of very very very popular manga (like FMA), or very very very very very (I'm talking top 10 sales) manga.

Of course if something is published digitally, I would buy it if I like it. If you look out for coin/token sales, they are not terribly expensive.

 

[KMoore]

Here's the reality of things here: There are so few services or stores that actually sells/streams mangas that most people just pirate it. If the actual market was more approachable and not fragmented, most people would actually buy mangas officially but every service is slower and you have to go to multiple stores just to buy one. As the gaming Jesus once said: Piracy is a Service Problem.

Examples that I want to point out of a good service would be Steam and Spotify. I'm not gonna lie, I used to download music, Spotify come out everything becomes so much easier, I start mainly using Spotify. I never pirated games but Steam is so convenient that I've used it my entire gaming life.

Really, what this thing reminds me of is Nintendo with older games, people were pirating it to actually conserve or play those old games. It's not until Nintendo realized that they could get revenue on it, that they started making those old games available officially. If they want to curb piracy then they need to come up with a better service than months of late releases but I doubt that they would ever make a centralized service for getting/streaming most mangas, considering how much they care about publisher brands.

 

[Robosox]

Piracy is a Service Problem

Sometimes it's a content problem too. I don't want to buy one more shitty cliched man(g,hw,hu)a just to find out its content. Even if the service is impeccable. And I don't judge literary/artistic works by their limited preview, it just doesn't work this way. I can read them in their entirety when bored but I won't ever sponsor one more of the plethora of low-effort ripoffs.

It is similar to how you don't tip a street performer just because they perform and want some money, however good their skills, stage and instruments are, only after watching and liking their entire performance and wishing for more.

 

[mihona]

I agree with the first half of their statement; that piracy isn't one's right. But I, like many people, like to read the first few chapters of manga or a book, to see if I'll actually read and enjoy the rest. With a lot of manga, this simply isn't possible, because they don't get licensed and therefore aren't physically or digitally available as samples in the "Western" world. And most never will. So I rather go the route of reading scanlated manga, and hope it gets licensed and I will be able buy it in one of my two native languages if available, and if it doesn't I'll just buy the Japanese version.

Same with most PC games; I pirate to sample, then buy the official versions.

At the end of the day artists/game devs/musicians/creators in general need to feed themselves too, because creative work is hard af work and needs to be appreciated and paid.

Also I wish (manga) artists had a Patreon or kofi equivalent, I'd love it if I could send them money just like that next to buying their work

 

[Robosox]

piracy isn't one's right

@mihona How come? Does content's author has more rights to decide whom I give my money than I am just because they created the content? Then every street performer has justification to rob you if they think you listened them for long enough.

 

[hazzack]

is piracy bad? yes.
are we going to stop? no.
are we being ass by either preach piracy or not? probably, i don't know.