| Manga publishers and Japanese music publishers (uh... essentially Sony) are actually very different. To be fair, quite a long time ago manga publishers were actually incredibly lenient/naive about managing their copyright. I'm not sure I should admit this publicly, but I used to do translation for a scanlation group (we only did things that were out of print even in Japan... taking the moral, if not legal high road ;-) ). Publishers at that time generally left you alone and didn't really care about scanlators because they thought that there wasn't a market in the west. This probably sounds unbelievable, but I actually talked my group into seeing if we could license the manga we were scanlating. I figured that since it was all obscure stuff (even in Japan) it wouldn't cost that much. So we contacted them and they were very interested. They sent us over a price sheet for various manga and I couldn't believe the cost. They were charging about $1000 per volume with no royalties! And that was for current stuff (at the time -- round about 2000). You may have heard of Viz (publisher of translated manga). I can't remember exactly, but I believe even Inu Yasha was priced around that point (and I couldn't believe that Viz didn't have an exclusive deal). But basically, all at once I realised that Viz was built by essentially getting all the manga for free and publishing it! Around about 2005, the manga publishers started to realise that they were being insane. Especially for manga that made it to anime, they began to aggressively get exclusive deals for the translation rights. Then they started to send out notices to groups (mostly fansubs, but I heard some scanlation groups got letters) to ask them to stop. As for our group, we couldn't convince them to go to a digital platform. They were still really wary about it and didn't understand the technology. We didn't want to go to print because... Ummm... we had no money and were only doing it for fun. So we let it slide. They never contacted us again although they clearly new we were violating their copyright. They just didn't care, I think. In my mind, anyway, that's how the manga/anime scene was built in the west originally anyway. It was powered by scanlation groups and fansubs. It was already super popular by the time the publishers realised that they had a market in the west -- and then they cashed in. It's hard to say what Japanese publishers should do. I agree that they should have moved to digital a lot earlier. However, even saying that, we scanlated a web manga from an author we liked. It was incredibly unknown in Japan even though the author had a successful anime. Nobody in Japan was interested in a free web comic at the time. Bizarre, but true. As for South Korea, I think they realise that they have to do things differently in order to break into the market. However, I'll predict that the situation will repeat itself. As soon as they have the kind of market share they want, they will start to close the doors. It's just the way these business guys think. |
This is basically how Crunchyroll got started. They only removed the pirated content after they got the Naruto license.
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2008-11-17/tv-tokyo-to...