Forum - View topicINTEREST: Yaoi Manga Artist Hatoko Machiyo Issues Statement on Scanslations
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Blanchimont
Posts: 3457 Location: Finland |
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/corrected... |
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cookiemanstah
Posts: 546 |
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what does this mean? Not conceding to the anime side of things, but I keep all my VNs and important documents in USBs that are still around ten years later. |
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Horsefellow
Posts: 262 |
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The sheer amount of people I see use those streaming pirate says says otherwise. I think the anime community is much more open to piracy than other mediums just by virtue of its history of lack of availability in the west. Also we skew younger and are more tech savvy. The nerdier a group is, the more likely they know how to do the things like circumvent rules and restrictions. I have never heard of anyone being arrested for pirating anime in America. I don't think American licensing companies have that kind of money or authority to scare people or ISPs into submission like HBO did when they started ordering Comcast and Xfinity into monitoring and cracking down on people not only illegally streaming Game of Thrones but also people who share HBO Go accounts and let other people watch HBO content without actually having a subscription to the channel. Funimation, Viz, and Crunchyroll do not have that kind of money or influence. And even then I don't even know if the ISP will actually do anything or if it's just a scare tactic. I've heard of people who got like 30 letters from Xfinity threatening to cut their service after the 6th one and they never did. I wouldn't know since I've never done it myself or gotten any angry letters.
So long as the drive doesn't completely fail and becomes unrecoverable, sure, but that doesn't do anything for people who want a nice looking DVD or Blu-Ray packaging on their shelf. |
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Blanchimont
Posts: 3457 Location: Finland |
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Trust me, usb devices, like hard drives, are far from invulnerable. They may fail even in storage after a length of time, but you won't know it until you try to boot it up. So the smart thing is to back up any digital stuff you care about to another drive or discs... |
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Puniyo
Posts: 271 |
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I certainly remember those days, but I'm not talking about then, and neither is the artist from the post. It's about her current work. Back then when there were no official paths for anime and manga, it was neccesary and even beneficial, I won't contest that, but times have definitely changed. |
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Zalis116
Moderator
Posts: 6873 Location: Kazune City |
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Again, going back to those view numbers and popularity rankings on illegal streaming and reader sites: the lion's share of that traffic is there for the recent/mainstream/popular titles that are legally available in English. Obviously regional unavailability plays a role, but that's still a whole lot of piracy for the sake of getting free stuff. Piracy isn't solely to blame for Random Title B not selling millions. Rather, it takes a bite out of everything, turning megahits into hits, hits into above-average sellers, above-average sellers into average sellers, average sellers into below-average sellers, and so on. That pushes creators and publishers to the widest-appeal, lowest-common-denominator end of the entertainment spectrum. After all, if a work targets a niche audience, the parties involved had better hope it's a niche audience that has and is willing to spend money. The history of the 2000s North American anime industry is filled with titles that were quite popular and well-loved online, but bombed in sales. We've seen this same effect in Hollywood, where practically everything's a big-budget superhero/sequel/reboot film now. They'll still spin the dial on ultra-cheap indie films and hope to score a hit now and then, but the kinds of mid-budget comedies, dramas, and experimental movies that used to be more common 20-25 years ago have largely disappeared. |
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nargun
Posts: 925 |
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I mean, you can't pirate food but restaurants are doing it tough too. The world today faces a complex tangle of economic problems, some as a result of increasing concentration of wealth (falling real wages, rising accomodation costs), some as a result of reducing concentrations of income (increased consumption in formerly "third world" areas raising costs of agricultural products) and some as a result of reduced agricultural output from climate change.
All of which work to reduce the relative and even absolute living standards of middle-claas-and-below westerners. Piracy is what the economists call an inferior or a substitute good, consumption increases as incomes fall. |
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El Hermano
Posts: 450 Location: Texas |
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The only way I can see people actually paying for piracy is if it's one of those apps on the Apple Store or Google Play that have scanlations on them which are scams. Otherwise, most pirates don't pay money to read scans. I wonder if this mangaka is just assuming people pay for pirated scans and doesn't realizes they're 99.9% of the time free unless someone is trying to scam people.
Do you have any specific titles in mind that were popular online but failed to sell well? I'd be curious to know what kind of series we're talking about there. There's probably a multitude of reasons why they failed beyond just piracy though. Are we talking the tail end days of the anime boom? Because everything I've read from industry people like Shawne Kleckner was that the bubble burst mainly due to companies over-licensing every show they could and the Japanese side was demanding higher and higher licensing fees each time which resulted in a lot of loss revenue when series would have to sell unrealistically above projected numbers to just break even. Also the shut down of stores like Suncoast which was considered the main distribute of anime DVDs back in those day. I also think that was around the time volume releases fell out of style in favor of boxsets. I also remember back then manga and anime had a habit of being very censored. When Viz was publishing the Shounen Jump magazine still a lot of titles were toned down to keep their T rating, and the volumes themselves were never released unedited so we have numerous titles from that era like Shaman King, One Piece, Hikaru no Go, and Dragonball that remained censored to this day. I know a lot of fans who pirate One Piece and other titles from Viz to this day because they deem the translation changes and censorship unacceptable and don't want to support that practice. I bring this up because there was some dub-only releases of semi popular series back then, like Shin-chan, Bobobo, and Zatch Bell. I can totally see why no one would buy those series if the official releases were censored dub only. |
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piotrus
Posts: 18 |
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I don't read much manga, so I might be wrong, but I am not even aware of a non-porn manga or anime pirate subscription service. All those streaming websites AFAIK are ad-supported.
I don't know about profits, TBH. I read a post by one of the people operating a relatively big pirate site that operates on ads and they said they barely break even. But that's hearsay... still, I never heard of pirates becoming particularly rich. And certainly most scanlators are either unpaid volunteers, or at best, I doubt are high earners. In fact, I tried looking for a scam site that sells works by Hatoko Machiyo and... I couldn't find it. All I see are the usual scan sites based on the 'read all and please click our ads' model. So I think it's the usual example of ignorance. Her works were probably pirated in Japan, maybe for profit, it's a big market there. She doesn't know how to use the net well, certainly as she admits herself she doesn't speak English so all she knows about the English market and such is hearsay, she heard there are some unofficial translations and assumed someone is making a tidy profit selling her works, were at best they are a generating few pennies through ad clicks to cover the cost of the servers hosting them. What I do find mildy annoying here are the manga artists that are saying "there is no official translation of my works, but until there is, all my foreign fans, please stop existing, don't read my works, wait for when it is translated - if ever. I don't want you reading my stuff for free, I don't care to make it available, so, solution, forget my works exist". Sigh. |
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