Japan vs. Manga Piracy: $800m Losses & 100 New Pirate Sites in One Month
Japan vs. Manga Piracy: $800m Losses & 100 New Pirate Sites in One Month
Over 1,300 pirate sites reportedly offer manga and in a single month, 100 new pirate sites appeared. Cost to the industry: $800m per month.
The assumption that pirates would pay rather than simply consuming other media is absurd.
These loss numbers are pulled out of thin air with no reasoning behind them.
84Ironically, manga is one of those mediums the users would like to pay for, to fill their bookshelves with, but 99% of manga never get officially translated or published outside of Japan, so they wouldn't have been sold even if 100% of pirates wanted to buy copies.
47Yeah. A lot of those sites are actually translating them, often from donations by the users. I doubt anyone is getting well paid on the unofficial sites, as when they release official translations a lot of people flock to those as they are often higher quality images.
32I hope I can say this without getting attacked by manga fans, but I can't effort manga, they are way too expensive to me. If I pay more for a manga than for two books, while I read the book 20 times longer, it doesn't feel like good investment to me. I know there's a lot of time spend on creating nice art and I too spend a few seconds admiring a good page, but that's about it. Anime is not much better, I don't enjoy spending hundreds of Euro or a thousand, for a series I watch once or twice.
5
Especially with Japanese Mangas, I can understand the appeal of piracy. Most of them officially never see the world outside Japan, so they are very hard to obtain for international readers. Which are a big part of the fandom, though.
So (apart from the stupidity of the tale that every copy would have brought 100% of the sales price if there was no piracy) the losses are primarily due to simply not selling their products on markets that are showing demand.
39Publishers, on international localization:
16It's not even good localisation! Fansubs / scanlations so many times are much better than anything that reaches the international audience. They dumb the fuck down of things to try to please an audience that are not the already hardcore fan readers that want things in a certain way done. I'm not going to buy some things I'd like because they remove color pages, good paper, spell names the wrong way, translate things like san to mr... It's horrible.
9
I call those estimates BS like always, but who knows.
Maybe they should focus on giving people a way to access those legally? Where on that poster campain say where to go? And secondly... They as always still introduce the BS regional locking!
33I would guess less than 2% of pirating users would have paid if unable to access. No accounting in these estimates for new fan recruitment, added word of mouth advertising generated, purchasing of brick and mortar licensed merchandise, purchase of additional digital media that may be harder to locate from pirate sources.
10And always translation groups, i only saw a handful official english versions, in hugely successful products.
7
Unless it's DRM Free, there's no way I'm buying a manga digitally. I have a bookshelf filled with manga and some even has localised stuff to my language; I can give any of them to a friend if I want to. I can't do that with any copy with DRM.
People already pirate the fuck out of this medium already; it's tons more easier hosting a few images compared to other media format like videos and music; there's nothing to lose with selling DRM free copies. I don't get why they bother with it.
30Whole Berserk is like my wage for two years of work, literally. I couldn't have afforded reading what became my favorite manga if not for piracy, even before the war. I could subscribe to some service if there was one to read them, like Spotify, but there were no legal way to do so, and manga books are priced like gold per their weight.
28Yeah I was able to get the books from my local library so I was really lucky but yeah for the most part the prices are ridiculous.
2
“The amount of free reading per month on the top 10 English translation piracy sites alone amounts to 800 million US dollars, a figure that is increasing every year and requires immediate action,” ABJ reported, citing figures from May 2024.
This is not the same as money lost, because some portion of those pirate readers might not have been willing to pay even in the absence of piracy.
With that said, the unique positive approach is intriguing.
22As I understand it, the pirated copies have unofficial translations... so it wouldn't have even possible for them to consume the media without the piracy in the first place.
21
I love when businesses try to calculate the loss of digital products, especially when they weren't on sale to most of the "thieves" in the first place.
It's like when the RIAA sued Limewire for 72 trillion dollars, which I'm pretty sure was more money than was circulating in the world at the time.
16They never had $800m, fake news.
6