Interest

Pirated Manga Artist Gujira Not Quitting After All

Last weekend, we reported on the erotic manga artist Gujira, who threatened to quit after discovering that his manga had been downloaded illegally 25,000 times. The news prompted a debate on Twitter over piracy and how to fight it, as well as lamentations from Gujira's fans and fellow dōjinshi artists about his impending departure.

Gujira clarified on January 20 that he wasn't serious about quitting and that he had written the tweet "while carried away by petty grumbling." He went on to write on January 24 that he had changed his mind since there was no way to protect himself from illegal uploading and downloading. "Instead, I should include viruses in an indefinite number of my works," he tweeted. "That should reduce the illegal downloads."

Gujira might not have to resort to hiding viruses in his work files. The English-language erotic manga website and publisher FAKKU announced on Thursday that the company contacted Gujira about licensing his first work, Gal toka Bitch toka Iroiro. ("A Gal, a Bitch, and Whatnot."). FAKKU credited media coverage of Gujira's problems with piracy for motivating them to contact him about publishing it and Gujira agreed, making Gal FAKKU's first new acquisition of 2016 (link NSFW).

Piracy is an ongoing problem in Japan and seems intractable due to the difficulty of punishing the perpetrators, especially if they are foreigners. FAKKU claims that the actual figure of illegal downloads of Gujira's work is more like 500,000. Yet there have been noteworthy recent legal attacks on pirates: Nintendo was awarded damages in a lawsuit against flash cartridge importers, while three Chinese pirates of Weekly Shonen Jump were arrested in Kyoto Prefecture last year.

[Via Yaraon! and Naver Matome; Image from Plurk]