Originally Posted by
Gjallarhorn
Let's go through the facts, and I'll address some of the statements made in this thread:
1. All of these sites which allow you to download or watch/read anime and manga online are illegal. They are distributing media without the consent of the copyright holders. None of them should exist anyway. Manga publishers are entirely within their right to shut down One Manga, and in fact, they should have closed it a long time ago.
2. These websites have been the cause, or at least a very large part of, a drastic decrease in anime and manga sales across the world. Anime and manga sales in Japan have slumped some 20 to 30% since 2006, and several formerly large animation studios have declared bankruptcy or gone out of business. These companies with decreasing sales still have to pay for materials, animators or mangaka and assistants, printing, advertising, and distribution.
3. When animation studios and manga publishers have more income they can afford to pay workers more, and afford to hire more people to work on the anime/manga, which results in higher quality animation or artwork, and more high quality series being released.
4. It's well noted that the average animator makes nearly nothing at all anymore. A typical animator could make about ¥1000000 per year, and while this may appear to be a large number, it is th equivelent of about $10,000USD per year, and it has been frequently cited that because they get paid by the number of frames they produce, they earn as little as $2-$3 per hour. I don't quite remember the stats on mangaka earnings, but unless one is the author of a very popular manga (Dragonball, One Piece, Naruto), then pay is barely any higher than that for an animator. Many mangaka will frequently hold a second full-time job to help pay for their living. At this point, animators and the majority of mangaka could make more money working at a fast food restaurant. And most certainly the growing rate of piracy of anime and manga effects these numbers.
5. Naruto is a childish manga. It is written and targeted at males 8-15 years old. The dialogue is childish, the characters are (mostly) childish, and the humor is childish. In fact, the online scanlations you read try to make it not childish by adding in more mature language and occasionally swear words...though the argument could be made that there are not "swear words" in Japanese the same way there is in English...meaning they can't really swear at all; though rudeness is entirely possible. The same is true for most shounen manga that you read online...the American anime and manga distributors are not dumbing the anime and manga down for children, that's simply how they always were in reality. An exception to this would be One Piece, which 4kids openly admitted it tried to dumb down to target children 7-11 years old.
6. Until recently, it was only illegal in Japan for anime and manga to be uploaded to the internet, but not to download it (unless it was licensed). This changed on January 1, 2010 when a law went into effect making it also illegal to download anime and manga, since it is still in violation of the copyright. The law isn't anime-and-manga specific, but is in regard to all copyrighted media; this updated Japanese copyright law to be more aligned with other countries. After this happened, a number of Japanese and American distributors and copyright holders joined together to slow down the piracy of manga. This group, called the JDCA, announced that it identified 30 large-scale websites that were distributing their copyrighted content online without permission, and that it intended to shut them down; they first offered a warning, and if that was not followed, they would take legal action. A number of very large scanlation sites and a few manga-readers and archives (including the largest scanlation community), before even getting their warning, removed the copyrighted content from their servers, while others (like OneManga) waited for the offical C&D letters to be served. Once received, they had to shut down or be faced with legal action. The JDCA says they have no intent to entirely stop manga piracy, as they realize it is impossible, but they wish to tip the curve of convenience away from piracy.
Edit: 7. I just checked out the OneManga site, and I noticed this in their statement: "Manga publishers have recently changed their stance on manga scanlations and made it clear that they no longer approve of it". Let me just point out that manga publishers never approved of scanlation, and were in fact always strongly opposed to it. Granted, manga-reader sites generally don't know crap about the manga industry or scanlation community, since they just take whatever they can find from the actual scanlators and throw it up on their website and rake in ad revenue. Anyway...it's a ludicrous statement; just be away of that.
My response to this is simple: Good. While I enjoy scanlations, I also buy what I like once it is available officially in English. The problem is that the majority of people do not do this and that has had a very large negative financial effect on the manga industry. Now the people who only pirated their manga and didn't buy any will actually go out and support the artists, authors, and the industry that they enjoy so much.
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