JemmyJapan vs. Manga Piracy: $800m Losses & 100 New Pirate Sites in One Month
moe90torrentfreak.com/japan-vs-manga-piracy-800m-los…
17 Comments
Comments from other communities
Comments in Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Japanese publishers' idea of fighting against manga piracy: kill all legal options and launch their own website that is only available in USA (kmanga).
Gee, I wonder why that didn't work!
For real, I'd pay for anime, manga, hentai, manhwan, western comics, etc. if there was just one site or a group of sites that: - required just one account and/or one subscription for all of them - was available worldwide with no restrictions - was fast - let me pay in any currency - translated everything in different languages
Fuck yeah I'd pay for that. Sign me the fuck up for that awesome legal option.
Instead we have whatever the fuck is going on right now. Fan-subs and fan-translations are mandatory because their shit isn't translated either ever or not in time. I want to give you my money for what I want and so that you make more awesome shit, but you fucking won't let me.
The ships have to sail 🤷
You forgot to mention the absolutely idiotic way kmanga works.
I'd mention that if they allowed me to even access the front page from my country. :)
Also have a crappy pricing scheme that people have been pushing against for years, while Shonen Jump rakes in money by having their app and monetization not suck
SabataI'm not convinced any legal anime site can actually offer anything better than what I can get for free. Service issue.
sigmaklimgrindsetSorry Japan, manga piracy/scanlations until I die. There are so many niche authors/manga that never get officially translated to any other language because your industry thinks everyone just wants to read shounen and only the top 1% of shoujo/seinen/josei. Don't even get me started on BL/GL.
Meanwhile some fucking random scanlation team does a better job of translating and making a chapter of Rose of Versailles more accessible to modern audiences than the entire Japanese manga publishing apparatus ever will.
Personally, I have a subscription to Shonen Jump's app and love it, while kmanga insists on trying to get you to buy individual chapters, which I refuse to do.
Piracy is a service problem
Shounen Jump is a great example. It works, it's readers find value in it enough to pay for subscriptions, and it clearly has some sort of profitability. A great model of what other manga magazines could do, but they refuse because most of them are run by dinosaurs and would rather cry "piracy is ruining our profits wah" when they DON'T EVEN HAVE A PRODUCT in the market to profit from!
terribleplan
Kissaki… new pirate sites appeared. Cost to the industry: $800m per month.
oh, because they're hosting those illegal sites? /s
I tried to read the attack on titan manga years ago. I bought a manga at Barnes and noble and thought it was a decent price. But then I read the entire book in like 20 minutes and thought to myself that I way over spent on the book.
I regretted that purchase. Maybe it’s worth while if you want to look at the art for a long time, but I just wanted the story.
The assumption that pirates would pay rather than simply consuming other media is absurd.
These loss numbers are pulled out of thin air with no reasoning behind them.
Deleted by author
Yeah. A lot of those sites are actually translating them, often from donations by the users. I doubt anyone is getting well paid on the unofficial sites, as when they release official translations a lot of people flock to those as they are often higher quality images.
I hope I can say this without getting attacked by manga fans, but I can't effort manga, they are way too expensive to me. If I pay more for a manga than for two books, while I read the book 20 times longer, it doesn't feel like good investment to me. I know there's a lot of time spend on creating nice art and I too spend a few seconds admiring a good page, but that's about it. Anime is not much better, I don't enjoy spending hundreds of Euro or a thousand, for a series I watch once or twice.
Especially with Japanese Mangas, I can understand the appeal of piracy. Most of them officially never see the world outside Japan, so they are very hard to obtain for international readers. Which are a big part of the fandom, though.
So (apart from the stupidity of the tale that every copy would have brought 100% of the sales price if there was no piracy) the losses are primarily due to simply not selling their products on markets that are showing demand.
Publishers, on international localization:
It's not even good localisation! Fansubs / scanlations so many times are much better than anything that reaches the international audience. They dumb the fuck down of things to try to please an audience that are not the already hardcore fan readers that want things in a certain way done. I'm not going to buy some things I'd like because they remove color pages, good paper, spell names the wrong way, translate things like san to mr... It's horrible.
That's a good point. It points to yet another example of a lack of understanding of their demographic.
I call those estimates BS like always, but who knows.
Maybe they should focus on giving people a way to access those legally? Where on that poster campain say where to go? And secondly... They as always still introduce the BS regional locking!
I would guess less than 2% of pirating users would have paid if unable to access. No accounting in these estimates for new fan recruitment, added word of mouth advertising generated, purchasing of brick and mortar licensed merchandise, purchase of additional digital media that may be harder to locate from pirate sources.
And always translation groups, i only saw a handful official english versions, in hugely successful products.
Unless it's DRM Free, there's no way I'm buying a manga digitally. I have a bookshelf filled with manga and some even has localised stuff to my language; I can give any of them to a friend if I want to. I can't do that with any copy with DRM.
People already pirate the fuck out of this medium already; it's tons more easier hosting a few images compared to other media format like videos and music; there's nothing to lose with selling DRM free copies. I don't get why they bother with it.
Whole Berserk is like my wage for two years of work, literally. I couldn't have afforded reading what became my favorite manga if not for piracy, even before the war. I could subscribe to some service if there was one to read them, like Spotify, but there were no legal way to do so, and manga books are priced like gold per their weight.
Yeah I was able to get the books from my local library so I was really lucky but yeah for the most part the prices are ridiculous.
This is not the same as money lost, because some portion of those pirate readers might not have been willing to pay even in the absence of piracy.
With that said, the unique positive approach is intriguing.
As I understand it, the pirated copies have unofficial translations... so it wouldn't have even possible for them to consume the media without the piracy in the first place.
I love when businesses try to calculate the loss of digital products, especially when they weren't on sale to most of the "thieves" in the first place.
It's like when the RIAA sued Limewire for 72 trillion dollars, which I'm pretty sure was more money than was circulating in the world at the time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LimeWire
They never had $800m, fake news.