Weekly manga anthology Shonen Jump has taken part in an anti-piracy campaign, ironically using a pirate as one of its figureheads.
Shonen Jump has attracted some attention for using noted pirate Monkey D. Luffy in its recent campaign against manga piracy, with some internet users pointing out the irony of using the One Piece protagonist as part of the project.
Their official Twitter account has sent out the following message:
“Let’s stop looking at illegal sites of pirated manga! This is a notice for the ‘STOP! Pirated versions’ campaign that many publishing companies are participating in. It’s connected to empowering and protecting manga authors so that they can continue producing new content. We ask for your cooperation.”
The organisers of the “STOP! Pirated versions” campaign have also produced a brief four-panel manga, detailing in rather dramatic fashion the effects of piracy on all levels of the manga industry:
Translation, courtesy of SoraNews:
“Panel 1: Manga artists
Sales have decreased due to the proliferation of pirated copies. Manga artists can’t survive. ‘I can’t eat!’
Panel 2: Editors
New talent can’t be cultivated in the manga industry full of hopes and dreams. ‘I can’t find any newbies!’
Panel 3: Bookstore staff
Due to declining sales and revenue, the status of bookstores is in trouble. ‘Manga’s really not selling anymore, huh.’
Panel 4: Readers
If the cycle of manga creation is broken, then ultimately the readers are the ones affected. ‘There’s no interesting manga!!!’
Let’s protect the cycle of creation. STOP! Pirated versions”
The half-century-old weekly anthology has teamed up with other publishers such as Kodansha and Kadokawa to inform manga fans about the scourge of online piracy, which it blames for the loss of $500 million worth of sales in Japan and $12 billion worth of sales in the United States. A single illegal distribution site, Manga Mura, is accused of costing the industry ¥320 billion.
Figures for the potential losses from piracy in other parts of the world are not given, which may give some indication of the industry’s attitude to minuscule markets such as Europe and continental Asia.
How about making the stuff cheaply available for online reading? Like what OpenManga tried years ago and which all the publishers denied cooperation. I say f♥♥k them. They couldn’t be bothered to modernize ten years ago, they may as well suffer the consequences now. Manga will be fine. Publishers (and those fucking editors that constantly ruin novel Manga) won’t necessarily be.
Different copyright laws and distributors for each country, all supported by an extreme archaic films industry bureaucracy that hasn’t changed since the 60s.
What we need, are international copyright laws that allow content to be distributed and bought globally. Even Netflix and others suffer a lot from all this bullshit despite their deep pockets, s♥♥t’s only worse for manga.
This has nothing to do with copyright laws and everything to do with content owners who refuse to licence worldwide rights to their content.
I have bought Kindle versions of Goblin Slayer and Domestic Girlfriend mangas from Amazon. What is your point?
Are they STILL thinking “pirated things” = “lost sales”? Because I got news for them: even if something was not piratable, that STILL wouldn’t turn it into a guaranteed sale, the end user would just look at something else that’s free. Is that really so hard to grasp?
In the end all they are doing is bullshitting themselves. Piracy is everywhere, you cannot stop it now, you cannot stop it in the past, hell it may certainly be impossible to fight back against in the future anyways.
All means of accusations about losing sales is not because of piracy, but merely lack of interest, or in the event of economic scale: simply not having enough to afford for it.
That is correct. Many who pirate something wouldn’t read or watch it if they had to buy it, and ironically, sometimes pirating something makes them a fan, so they go out and buy it afterwards.
Piracy is sometimes free marketing, and some studies (which were repressed and covered up, like one in Europe) actually showed a relationship between Piracy and INCREASED purchases with things like games.
99% I’ve read were translated by the fans. Several times i donated to these translate-groups about $3-5 for server and food.
Newest official manga release in my country is 3 year old manga, already finished. What sells they talking about?
Ok, I’m gonna pay about $3 (Shonen Jump price is 300 yen) for magazine if it will be in stores 2-3 days later than in Japan and translated. No? Then f♥♥k off.
Then sell it everywhere in the world , but wait , you don’t , so we have to read it online .
Thing is if there was a official website that kept up to date and was translated with a reasonable subscription service i’d be willing to pay but as far as I know there isn’t so i’ll keep on reading muh manga the way i have for years.
Viz has that for some Shonen Jump titles. Not for all the series in that magazine since they can only hire so many translators, and some series probably aren’t worth that extra effort since they likely either won’t appeal to an American audience or possibly won’t even last that long in Japan’s Jump.
It’s a lot harder to have something like that where it’s just one company holding the license to a whole bunch of series being published in various magazines, just because of all the licenses to deal with and even how different companies in the US have licenses to different series. Manga’s still a niche subject, so it’s not likely it’d work out like Netflix’s success with TV shows and movies.
And the worst thing is that they do their utmost to prevent foreigners from buying legally the manga, since they hold the rights only for the United States.
Meanwhile, their own manga gets read on a pirate website by people from Malasya, South Africa, Argentina and Norway.