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Just had a big argument with Kouryuu from Mangagamer on copyright


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[05:45] <Aaeru> just had a big argument with Kouryuu from mangagamer on copyright

[05:46] <Aaeru> took place on twitter though, so it's very hard to follow https://twitter.com/Aaeru_ (scroll down)

[05:46] <Aaeru> at least i put forward some of my ideas to him & others

Sry almost impossible to follow, but you might be able to scab choice bits.

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Sorry I know it's /jp/-like but this is a very interesting quote

1PKss.png

This is a tough one, u need to have an understanding of copyright as a government-grant monopoly privilege to the artist as a reward for the publishing of his arts.

Anyone want to try dismantling this one?

(i gave my shot on twitter)

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Erm... Twitter... Somewhat hard to go through conversations.

This may be completely off the mark, but I'll give it a shot.

===

From what I can read, it seems that Mangagamer is trying to exert control of their products past the first sale, or the "First Sale Doctrine" (This is the US by the way).

Exclusive Rights in Copyrighted Works - 17 USC § 106

Limitations on Exclusive Rights - 17 USC § 109

Licencing =/= Copyright

Crunchyroll Holds the copyright for none of their shows, they are only licensed to distribute. I would also assume that the same holds true for Mangagamer.

Noez, can Noez be applied to this?

===

Aaeru ‏@Aaeru_

@Draneor @Kouryuu_ there's some level of insanity to assuming that without copyright, ppl wont pay for things #kickstarter #HumbleBundle

In support of above: Good Old Games, Baen Free Public Library

As for Baen, Wiki, because I can't find the original article, so this will have to suffice.

The Baen Free Library represents an interesting experiment in the field of intellectual property and copyright. It appears that sales of both the books made available free and other books by the same author, even from a different publisher, increase when the electronic version is made available free of charge.[1]

===

Crunchyroll also made (some of?) their money off fansubbers, or was it that without fansubbers, they would not have been what they are now. Can't find any direct sources, so this will have to do, can't vouch for the accuracy of this, but it could be likely, it's just a matter of tracking down the older fansubers and asking.

-Edit-

I know this is disjointed, just bear with me, I'll have a real counterargument put together soon.

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O shi, that argument against Noelz' infuriates me.

Noelz has been one of biggest benefactors of human culture by his entrepreuneur skills. He's taken the risk of investing in the infrastructure needed to provide the service of printing petabytes worth of image data to millions upon millions of people, FOR FREE, and greatly expanding the western minds with the Japanese ideas, and he does this by slightly refocusing their attention to an Ad every now and then!

It is precisely because there is a business model to sustain the labour of gathering and printing translators' work that this can even be possible. Or are translators suggesting that we should all go learn how to queue DCC requests from bots on IRC and wait those queue lines, then have them steadily stream bits to us one by one causing ALL of us to lose so much of our precious free time (that could have been used reading more manga)... not to mention the time needed to find said channels (which are incredibly obscure), and we lose an important centralized place to discuss and find recommendations for new manga (bcuz it will no longer have the traffic to be called centralized). Not to mention the important archiving effect of the online manga centers, it is preserving human culture for our children.

Creating scanlations alone does not sustain a living. Charging for new scanlations CAN sustain a living. In fact many already do.

You need to have a business model to turn your labour (which is your investment capital) into revenue through the market process (i.e. via market demand. if there is a demand for your scanlation work, then they sustain u).

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O shi, that argument against Noelz' infuriates me.

Noelz has been one of biggest benefactors of human culture by his entrepreuneur skills. He's taken the risk of investing in the infrastructure needed to provide the service of printing petabytes worth of image data to millions upon millions of people, FOR FREE, and greatly expanding the western minds with the Japanese ideas, and he does this by slightly refocusing their attention to an Ad every now and then!

It is precisely because there is a business model to sustain the labour of gathering and printing translators' work that this can even be possible. Or are translators suggesting that we should all go learn how to queue DCC requests from bots on IRC and wait those queue lines, then have them steadily stream bits to us one by one causing ALL of us to lose so much of our precious free time (that could have been used reading more manga)... not to mention the time needed to find said channels (which are incredibly obscure), and we lose an important centralized place to discuss and find recommendations for new manga (bcuz it will no longer have the traffic to be called centralized). Not to mention the important archiving effect of the online manga centers, it is preserving human culture for our children.

Creating scanlations alone does not sustain a living. Charging for new scanlations CAN sustain a living. In fact many already do.

You need to have a business model to turn your labour (which is your investment capital) into revenue through the market process (i.e. via market demand. if there is a demand for your scanlation work, then they sustain u).

So I'm guessing I completely missed the point?

I didn't mean for it to be interpreted that way =(

You make an interesting argument, I've only thought of NOEZ as a company that profits unfairly. Didn't think to see them that way before. Then again, thinking more in depth, Google also makes a boatload of money off other peoples content. I think that the central argument against NOEZ is that they don't credit back to the scanalators.

Which can also have negative effects on the scanalators. Most that I've worked with/spoken with mention that they watermark their releases to hell and back because they know that it will end up on one of NOEZ's sites. That overall reduces the quality of the work because of NOEZ. With other sites like Batoto, which is a volunteer basis, you almost never see watermarks because the scanalators gave permission for their scans to be hosted.

Back to the Crunchyroll thing...

Most fansubbers do a CR modified, where they correct the little things that the CR TL'ers missed. Thus they are not competing directly against CR since all their releases are after the initial CR release. Aaeru, I'm not sure how you are TL'ing it, but if it were to come out before CR's release, then it would cut into their audience. It makes me wonder how much money if factoring into these C&D letters and such, I think if a group released everything 5 weeks late, then people would not care that much versus a group that released 1 day early.

"I'm also doing the official translation for Da Capo 3, so it would be nice if you stopped subbing it."

"Official" things are nice if you intend on taking them the way they were designed to. CR is for media consumption, you watch a few ads, and you watch your shows. Thats it. No TL notes, some of the cultural things get lost in translation, some localization may be seen. CR (or "official") is nice for consumption, but for education, I find CR near useless. Have to look around to find the translators, no TL notes, and usually not much is explained in the way of translation style (localization vs. Direct).

Watching Baka and Test, I (at that time) didn't know that Hideyoshi talked in old Japanese. That was never explained in "official" subs, but looking at a fansub, I could tell quite instantly that his speech pattern was different, and I started to pay attention to the way he talked rather then the subtitles on the screen. Fansubs are helpful if you apply them to non-standard usage.

I get the feeling that I am digging myself deeper and deeper....

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Well I read through it (but twitter so complicated to read conversation!! xD)

And even though I don't understand all that is going on as I don't follow the TL scene as much, I know this:

Everything can be done for free and I as someone who uses lot of free things try to also offer what little I do for free (now this has nothing to do with VNs or anime in my case). So I would agree there with Aaeru.

However even though everything can be done for free, in this world there are still things that are not free and to get those you also need to get paid for stuff you could potentially do for free. You need money to buy food because it is not free, you need money to even pay for clean air as not even that is free anymore here. And in that I have to agree with Kouryuu, he just wants to live off doing translation and even though he could do it for free, nobody is going to give him food for free, give him place to live for free.

However I do not agree with him going against the free competition. He can do TL for money, but he has no right to tell people to stop doing it for free. If I volunteer to go helping old people for free, I don't expect people that work in the care system to get mad because they get paid for it.

In order to survive in this world, you need to find a nice balance, do as many things for free because you can also use other people's work for free. But you still need something to buy the things that are not free.

As I already mentioned I work on the internet in book selling system - and people pay us for books they can torrent or download for free on various sites - because it is a digital copy of the book, it doesn't cost anything to give it to them. However I have this as my job and get paid for it - that way I can afford to live. They pay for the convenience to have the books on one place, just like on steam. And even though they can get it free and I could be giving it for free to people, I cannot expect anyone to give me free food and water and roof to live under. Because nobody will.

So you are both right and wrong. You are similar, but each of you charges people for something else. He charges people for his translation works and then maybe does lot of things for free. You Aaeru charge nothing for your TL work, but surely you still do something to earn money, you could do it for free but you can't because that way you couldn't afford to live. I don't know what your source of income is but whether it is manual work or some data entry work or work in McDonald's or you have a business, you need to get paid for it. That way you have way to live and you can do free stuff for the rest of the day

So you just need to understand each other, he needs to understand that you can do free stuff he does for money (and he has no right to stop you). And you need to understand that just like you do your paid job, he needs one too to live. He does free stuff in different place.

Its not like he is a millionaire, I don't like those because those just have money sitting or account and still do charge for their work (and sometimes its not even their work). If I could get everything for free, I wouldn't charge anything for what I do. But some people have more then they can use (and they even use much more then they need). After I pay my life expenses I have like 100$ a month left, I do with that because there is lot of free stuff on the internet, sadly I can't afford a plane to places I want to visit like Japan. But I rather do some stuff for free and not visit Japan, than if I would get paid for everything and have all money for myself - sadly many people go only for money and their own happiness and that needs to be fixed.

For example politicians in this country take too much money and their work is not even worth it. If they just took what normal person needs, we wouldn't have to pay for state services. Few years ago we still didn't have to pay for medical care, doctor visits etc. Now we do have to pay. And I think in this case it is even worse in America (with health care). And because America has so big influence over the economy, I don't think this copyright bullshit can change, because it all originated there. Hard to say if communism with socialistic economy really worked as it was intended to work (as the original author explained in the book), it could really be a good political system with good economy, however it is only a theory and nowhere in the world it ended up working. Because there are always greedy people and thus in theory good communism/socialism turned into totalitarianism and other shit. (and even so many older people here always remember how everything was free... yeah too bad it wasn't the only thing, too bad it brought very big disadvantages with it as well, because of bad evil people)

Now don't take me like some socialist communism fan, just saying that if it work as wrote on paper, it could be good, just like would be democracy and capitalism on paper - they sound good but in reality they are shit, I don't prefer any of the systems, neither of them works on this planet.

However it is not really problem of the systems but a problem of the people and there will always be bad people.

Anyway neither Aaeru or Kouryuu are one of those, you just do things differently, get paid for something else. So you should not argue and just accept each other and live happily as you can in this corrupted and rotten society.

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However I do not agree with him going against the free competition. He can do TL for money, but he has no right to tell people to stop doing it for free. If I volunteer to go helping old people for free, I don't expect people that work in the care system to get mad because they get paid for it.
This has a parallel in the software industry, with the open-source movement. There are many companies that pay for jobs working on open-source software, and they still make a profit from it. They have realised that the old business models do not benefit the consumer nor the producer, and changed to providing the software for free and charging for support, i.e. moving to services instead of product.
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i.e. moving to services instead of product.

How would you adapt this move to those media (manga, anime, VN) ? having an online reader/streaming for free and paying only if you want a physical release ?

Because doing support for VN is useless, companies make money by charging (mostly) other companies, and "open source" doesn't mean "free of charge".

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How would you adapt this move to those media (manga, anime, VN) ? having an online reader/streaming for free and paying only if you want a physical release ?

Because doing support for VN is useless, companies make money by charging (mostly) other companies, and "open source" doesn't mean "free of charge".

Well just like it is now, the fastest sub groups release it for free (talking about anime now so UTW etc.) And then people who end up liking the anime buy the BD release (and they are willing to pay the extra for the shipping) and they buy figs and other stuff.

They will not buy figs for anime they don't like so it even forces the makers to do good anime. If you make shit and charge upfront, many people might buy it and not have their money worth, this happens lot of times in PC gaming too, now even with most companies not releasing demo. Yet in free to play games, you can play first month without spending any money and if the game is good, you end up buying more then you would pay. I am guilty of that, bought tons of stuff for free to play MMOs (like pso2 JP) and other games like FPS (tribes, planetside etc).

As for VNs, you can check my post explaining why making the VN free for start and they buying the endings etc would be a good idea so you don't fall into shit VN you dont like but finish just beause you paid for it :

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This is a really interesting discussion. I'm currently reading a lot of Lawrence Lessig's stuff about free culture and things like that, but to be honest I haven't really formulated my own opinions yet.

Aaeru, I recall you having a couple of blog posts where you outlined your views on this stuff, are they still around?

For those of you who are interested, I have a few questions: do you think fan translations damage profits for the 'official companies? if Yes, do you think this is a bad thing? Who do you think should profit from visual novels? Do you think there should be no 'official' translations?

I'm really interested to hear everyone's views :)

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For those of you who are interested, I have a few questions: do you think fan translations damage profits for the 'official companies? if Yes, do you think this is a bad thing? Who do you think should profit from visual novels? Do you think there should be no 'official' translations?

I'm really interested to hear everyone's views :)/>

Here's my view (probably kind of simplistic compared to the preceding):

1. No, I don't think fan translations necessarily damage profits. As long as the patch can be applied to a store-bought game and as long as there is no official translation in that language, then I think it's ok.

2. Yes, I think it's bad.

3. No comment on the business model right now, only, anything unofficial should not be sold. Especially not for a profit.

4. I'm ok with there being both official and unofficial translations.

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do you think fan translations damage profits for the 'official companies? if Yes, do you think this is a bad thing? Who do you think should profit from visual novels? Do you think there should be no 'official' translations?

1. No, there is no way it can damage the developer. Just like piracy of PC games doesn't damage game developers, it is just being used as an excuse for bad game. If you look at Witcher 2, it was one of the most pirated games (at least according to some random stats so it actually might be all wrong) yet also most successful, because it was a good game and even pirates buy good games, if only for 50% discount on steam, they still buy something they wouldn't.

If you make a bad game, people will pirate it but maybe not even finish it, thanking god for the pirated copy and not wasted money.

2. Well as I said it cannot damage developers, there is a slight change it can piss off publishers, don't know how the Japanese market works exactly but in western I don't give a fuck about publishers, I support developers and that's why I will give money to Obsidian on Kickstarter, but not give money to EA and other evil companies for their shit DLC practices (or from Japanese - Capcom, wtf... I'm sure they will sell Dante skin with white hair for 10$ xD).

3. Developers and developers only. In some cases even translators as they do hard work. Publishers should earn a targeted income based on what the original investment was and what the advertisement costs and maybe something extra for future projects, but the rest of the money should go back to the development studio itself, not some random other studios.

4. Depends what you mean by official translation, If it really is official translation done by the Japanese company like in the case of Planetarian, I support it. If it is translation based on bought license, it depends how they handle it. I do not like what I found out JAST doing, censoring parts of the game etc. Even the uncensor is bad for me, I just want the game as they have it in Japan, just in language I can understand. There fan translations do the best job.

As long as the patch can be applied to a store-bought game and as long as there is no official translation

I agree with fan translations even if there is JAST or MG or whatever translation, fan translations are often times better and I want the better experience. However "professional" can it be, the passion for the game only comes from developers and fans, therefore fan translation or official TL in development of the game would be best.

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I do not like what I found out JAST doing, censoring parts of the game etc.

fan trad does indeed a best job because they don't have to follow the law. Look at the guy who went to jail because he imported manga. (link). In France, they censored the last part of "Naked Star" from Oh! Great 'cause of a loli.

You should not blame Jast but the fucking US gov. « yes you can have a gun at home (kill people with it) but you can't show a nipple? » (the "Janet Jackson Scandal")

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I'm no good following the conversations on twitter, but all this discussion gave me some ideas on the matter so i'll put them here to see if it picks up some opinions.

I'll start with this:

For those of you who are interested, I have a few questions: do you think fan translations damage profits for the 'official companies? if Yes, do you think this is a bad thing? Who do you think should profit from visual novels? Do you think there should be no 'official' translations?

I'm really interested to hear everyone's views smile.gif

Well, i don't think it damages the profits for the companies since from the begin those works are directed to an audience that they're not even considering. We should profit the developers because it's their work and in most cases is something we like, that's why we get it. And i think there should be fan and "official" translations because both are different, it's not like they're really competing or thats' the way it should be. But well, all of this is just my opinion. Now, going on with the ideas...

I was thinking, what if there were a page like DLSite but focused on VN's? Not only that, but specifically on translated VN's, i mean, the concept that poped in my mind is a page that serves as an bridge for VN's to the west. The mechanic would be basically a page that contacts VN's companies and offers them to translate and sell their works, you could use fan translators to make them, and give them some percentage of the sales for their work, also the page would get some percentage, let's say 10% of each sale that the companies get and that money would be used mostly for maintenance of the server, and also you would be making the companies to give some type of recognition to the TL teams. It would be a mechanic like Steam or most of the apps stores, at first of course it will be difficult, but gaining some companies in your list you'll become a trust-worsthy page. It could also foment the competition on the fan TL ground, you could release various versions of some VN and of course the profits would go to those who got the sale, making it more competitive and getting us better translations. Also there should be the demos of the games for free so you can get a grasp about the game and the translations available and sometimes, if you get the companie permission, even some games for free (again, like in Steam) and that could get more atenttion to those companies and people that like those VN would like to get other works from them. Maybe one of the most important points are the costs of the games, cause they're not really cheap, but that could be negotiated since what they're doing is actually offering a service to increase their profits with a reduced cost of material, prints and distribution, what could get lower prices for this market and of course it may count with a pay system of paypal and bitcoin. About content i think since it's for other countries than japan they could actually distribute uncensored content, but maybe with some options about this matter for those who don't really like uncensored versions, but those are just minor details. And also since it's illegal to distribute that kind of material (uncensored) in japan don't know if it's okay since the server won't be there, don't know much about law and maybe some things don't make sense but i'm really cold right now so i'm not thinking properly, anyway, i'll go on.... Also there should be something about that on the terms and conditions of the page to make responsible the person that is getting the material on it about the laws of each country, just to be on a safe spot.

How would you adapt this move to those media (manga, anime, VN) ? having an online reader/streaming for free and paying only if you want a physical release ?

Because doing support for VN is useless, companies make money by charging (mostly) other companies, and "open source" doesn't mean "free of charge".

About this, the first thing that came to my mind was Ragnarok Online, when it became free again and decided to make profits for goods and stuff instead, but i don't think that could work for this, since there are the costs of shipping and other matters on the VN's ground, so that's how all of the babbling above came to my mind, and also the discussion that bringed up this topic, I too think both of Aaeru and Kouryuu are right and wrong, so that possibly the answer was in a middle point.

With all that said this were just ideas, nothing with a real second though so i'm almost sure my sweet words are filled with holes, but's that's why i decided to write them, and since i don't feel my fingers anymore i'll leave it at that.

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