For $80, I could buy every Stephen King book I’ve not read yet.
As of this writing, Naruto, the most popular manga series currently in circulation is up to volume 58. Each volume retails for $10, then the entire run would cost $580, and that's before taxes. What kind of person has that kind of disposable income?
I was happy when Shonen Jump was released in the US several years ago. Shonen Jump is a manga anthology, each issue contains several chapters of a few different manga in it. I bought a subscription and had it active for a few years. I started to care less and less about it once Sandland concluded. Then I let it lapse. I have no idea what’s in it now.
Like I said, they don’t make it easy for people to find a new manga to get into. Why spend money on a series you might hate when you can pop onto a website and read a few chapters of it, heck, why not read the whole thing?
A coalition of comic book and manga publishers in the US and Japan has been pushing for litigation against at least 30 illegal scanlation websites.[1]
Scanlation is a portmanteau of “scan” and “translation” it refers to the act of obtaining the original (usually Japanese) language release of a manga (either by physically obtaining a copy or downloading a raw copy, a copy that is still in its original language).
Diehard fans translate their favorite series and release it on one of several popular scanlation websites. Manga isn't the only thing that can be scanlated, though, when it comes to anime, the word used is fansub.
Sure, one of the manga scanlation sites that’s under attack by the coalition is a Google Top 1000 website with page views that hover in the billions, but the questions are:
A. How much manga on that site is available commercially in the US? I talked to a friend of mine and found that he enjoyed a certain manga. Only nine volumes of that series were legitimately translated and released in the US, out of 20 volumes altogether. Then, for whatever reason, the US company that was legitimately translating and releasing it, canceled it. There are still 11 volumes unreleased in English. The friend went on to tell me how he read the rest of the series online as it was the only place that he could read the entire series. Oh, and that series has to be translated into English by a fan who enjoyed that series as well. I felt my friend's pain, as the company that had been releasing Loveless in the US decided to drop their license.
That’s just an example of something we used to have, but don’t have any more. What about the series that never came out here at all?
B. Would the people who read the manga online have bought it? This goes for the ones not released here as well as the ones that are. It’s the old question about downloading MP3s. Is it really “theft” if no physical item was removed?
Clearly there is a massive demand for easily obtainable manga and anime.
There are several authors who make pretty good money by releasing their material for free on their websites while also selling books. Cory Doctorow, an author (who also has an essay in this collection) does just that. By having the digital version of a book advertise for the printed version, it allows his work to spread further than it would have otherwise.
With today's print-on-demand companies, no one has to deal with a big publisher. This book you're reading right now, No Safe Harbor, was published as a free-to-download PDF. But, a print-on-demand version was also created. These POD companies print books as they are sold, so there is no warehouse to maintain a backlog of unsold books.
If we take that idea back to manga, it would be incredibly easy for a US or Japanese manga publisher to release content on a website for reading, and then have a system set up with a print-on-demand publisher to print only the copies of the full volume that are ordered by either bookstores or people. Of course, the thing that most likely stands in the way for such a system is rights and licensing of materials across several countries, hiring of translators, and other support people, as well as fear.
Fear?
Yes, fear. Most companies know how to make money doing what they are doing. They are afraid to try something new for fear that their house of cards could tumble down. They fear that which is new. Song writers feared player pianos, musicians feared radio, television broadcasters feared the VCR, music publishers feared Napster. It's a cycle of fear.
3. Why do you think piracy is illegal? The idea that sharing anything online is piracy is absurd. Actual piracy requires forceful and aggressive acts, committed against those who would keep a cargo safe from harm. The cargo in this case is the freedom to act. We would take it from those who jealously guard it for themselves and divide it amongst everyone in the country.
The Pirate Party wants to “raid” the law and “carry away” (repeal) laws which do not serve those on our metaphorical boat. The trick of it is: we’re all in the same boat. It is in service to those on our boat (the United States) that we aim to help.
We are not willing to accept that file sharing should be banned (and will take steps– once we have party members in office– to ensure that any laws in this regard are adamantly opposed, since technology isn’t the problem, but rather education about what its proper use is). On the other hand, we do agree that there is a significant amount of wrong being done to our rights in the name of protecting those whose sole aim for over 50 years has been the control and manipulation of human minds. Brainwashing our population is against our national interest in maintaining a democracy.
4. Should file sharers be punished? Should file sharers who sell the content for a profit be punished?: Back in the day, before the Internet. People would create “mix tapes” these were audio tapes that someone had painstakingly recorded a few songs from several vinyl records or other tapes to. Typically these were given to friends, not “friend” in the Internet sense, but friend in the local sense. You could really only physically hand these mix tapes to people you knew in person. These tapes were generally given as a kind of sampler, like a “this is the kind of music I’m in to, and I think you might dig it as well” kind of thing.
These tapes were given freely to people, and usually didn’t contain more than one or two songs by a particular artist. To the purveyors of mix tapes, these were not only seen as somewhat free advertising for artists, they were believed to be fair use (which is a tricky thing to actually prove), and then there’s the Audio Home Recording Act, which made the companies that created and sold blank audio tapes and tape deck recorders pay royalties to music writers and music publishers, whether or not the tapes were used to copy music. So right there, that was almost like the government saying it was legal to make mix tapes. (However, that does not make the old Napster or burning CDs on your computer legal).[2]
But, the second part of the question has to do with the selling of such content for profit. That is undeniably wrong. In November, 2010, I wrote a USPP newsletter item about a trip I made to the flea market. On this particular trip, I found a man selling obviously bootlegged DVDs on recordable media with the names of the films written on them with a Sharpie. That guy was breaking the law.[3]
He should be punished, as should other people who try to sell other people’s content for money. He is just as guilty as someone who would rent out the use of your car without you knowing, and without you receiving any of the proceeds thereof.