I had a friend recently point me to a website: OneManga.com. Let me say this first: I completely abhor sites like this, and I find it despicable. Now, in summary, this website appears to take public submission of scanned and translated Japanese manga, and makes them readable via your browser. They have hundreds of titles, and hundreds of thousands of scanned pages. Here's what is wrong with it:

• None of the content is accredited to either the original author, publisher, source, or translator.
• None of the translations are checked for accuracy or quality.
• It is commonly accepted "grey practice" on the internet to cease distribution once a title has been licensed for release in English. (note LICENSED, not RELEASED) Many of the titles on this site have since been licensed and released. The only note on this site is on the chapter listing page stating "This title has been licensed for release in the US by publisher X." There is no link to the publisher, nor to Amazon. And all of the content is still entirely readable. Sites like AnimeSuki will de-list series immediately upon licensing. Note that actual international treaties have been prooven in the court of law that this is still illegal.
• The site is plastered in banner ads and promotions. I bet the site operators are making tons of money on this site, and not a single dime is going to anyone responsible for the content that is bringing them the traffic.

So, in short: this website pisses in the face of international treaties, copyright law, and moral behavior. It refuses to even make a statement on the legality of its content or even to take credit for its own actions. Not only that, but its usage policy states that the uploaders (who are uncredited) are liable for any uploaded content, that they are the legal copyright holders or representatives, and that OneManga may reuse anything uploaded in any manner that they wish. Why, according to this usage policy, they could legally take the content uploaded, and print it up in a book and start publishing without any regard to the Japanese artist or publisher or even to the legal American license-holder or publisher.

Ok, maybe that wasn't so short.

Don't get me wrong, I love reading GOOD manga. I buy any manga I love. And I think that fan-translated mangas ('scanlations' as they are currently called) are important to growing the popularity of a series to the point where an American publisher will pick it up. I would easily pay $10/month for access to a site like this. Hell, I wonder why Amazon dosn't have an all-you-can-read plan available for their Kindle e-book reader, as layered in DRM as it is. I'm still waiting for publishers to include electronic versions of their books after purchasing the paper version. It should be included. But simply ignoring the law not only isn't a good idea, but it just isn't moral.

I have the same problem with sites like YouTube or any other site that allows users to upload video. Especially when the videos commonly uploaded are plain outright infringing. A perfect example of this are the episodes of Eureka Seven, Naruto or DragonBall that are uploaded by users to GameSpot whenever a new game based on these titles is nearing release. If these user-uploaded-video websites were nearly as commited to "supporting the industry" as they say they are, they would have a button clearly labeled "flag for copyright infringement" right next to the button that says "flag for inappropriate content".

Labels: copyright, manga, OneManga.com