Has anyone been watching the recent news about manga piracy crackdown? There's been several people recently arrested in Japan and China. It makes me wonder how access to manga will change and will it even possible search for on the internet.

last edited at Nov 20, 2015 1:32AM

They're not gonna stop piracy. Not even the music, film or game industries are able to stop piracy.

last edited at Nov 20, 2015 1:37AM

They're not gonna stop piracy. Not even the music, film or game industries are able to stop piracy.

no not completely but if several getting arrested it will cause people to get scared of up loading it.

People get arrested all the time.

People get arrested all the time.

I'm not disagreeing with that. I'm just saying this crackdown seems different then in the past. I'm not even saying that people won't do it. I'm just saying that saying that it may not be as easy to get it.

Just see it like this. The American Film and Music industry hasn't been able to stop piracy despite being one of the most powerful and influential industries in the world. Japan might've busted some people, others will raise to take their place.

I don't really see how this would affect anything one way or another. Most people who illegally obtain manga are outside the jurisdiction of China and Japan. Don't really see internet censorship accomplishing anything either. China's a perfect example of that. They try their hardest to block content they don't like yet a determined person can still manage to find that stuff.

And Dark_Tzitzimine's point is kinda extremely important here. If one of the most powerful and influential industries in the world can't accomplish it then there's basically no chance less powerful and influential industries stand any chance at it.

scare tactics, breh

I like the "carrot" side of this, where a couple of hundred titles will be available at a discount. That's an important step that some music distributors found works well against piracy, take down as many barriers as possible in front of people wanting to buy the product in question, while punishing the most egregious offenders (largely Chinese companies making a profit from piracy in this case, near as I can tell).

I doubt this will have much direct effect on scanlators, other than removing some sources of free raws.

If a handful of translators were punished for working on yuri, the yuri scene would be dead.

The incident I'm aware of involves a massively popular shounen series basically being stolen from the mail supply and released as internet piracy before even being published in Japan, so it's hard to extrapolate. If two people from Norway and Malaysia want to scanlate a decade-old out-of-print Kari Sumako tankoubon over e-mail I don't know that they could ever be prevented or that there would be any incentive to do so.

Maybe you're overreacting because 2 cases with very popular series were news recently... Boku no hero and one piece.