The Sin Of Greed

Sound Advice.

silverado writes: In regard to the recent anti-piracy activities in the film, music and manga industry I’ve decided to write this post as a warning to all website owners who are currently hosting scanlations or fansubs to think twice about a take down request!

The publishers made their move and it’s now up the community and admins to make ours. Despite many rumors and confusion there is one thing we can tell for sure: Going to court is the worst of all possible scenarios!

If the scanlation community wants to survive and maintain the freedom they are enjoying now, it is of utmost importance that all US online manga viewing sites comply with the publisher’s take down requests. Because it takes only one loss in court to create a leading case to make scanlations officially and forever illegal. For the first time in history is the creation and hosting of scanlations threatened. Do you remember Morpheus P2P or Kazaa? Winny or ShareEX2? File sharing was tolerated until it grew too big to be neglected by the industry. This is the same. If this case gets through, there will be no gray-zone, no tolerance, no tolerated hosting anymore! A loss in court will result in a wide spread trickle-down effect on all US webhosting providers. Scanlations will be seen as cancer that has to be cut out and pursued. Hosting scanlations, even unlicensed material will be classified as illegal software. Webhosting accounts will be banned, IPs might be given out to find the uploader. This is all a real threat and it pains me to say that this is legally possible and a very probable scenario. So if you all want to continue reading scanlations from your favorite group, stop whining about it and start supporting your admin’s decision to take down licensed series! We all are carrying the moral responsibility to set the legal environment for future scanlations! So support your admins decisions to take down manga! As for the admins, think twice before you don’t comply to a take down notice. The best solution for the scanlation community and the corporation is to cooperate exist next to each other. Don’t force them to use legal weapons of mass destruction. It’s a lose-lose situation for all of us.

“He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious.” – Sun Tzu
silverado