Forum - View topicNEWS: Manga Piracy Site Manga Rock Rebrands as MR Comics
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NiPah
 SubscriberPosts: 205 |
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It’s an interesting business model switching from pirated content to legit, I hope it works for them as well as it worked for Crunchyroll and Fakku.
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Takizawa-Shinzou
Posts: 102 |
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Ah, the Crunchyroll approach. They're not being honest about this at all lol. They likely did this due to many legal threats over the years. They trying to act like they actually care is kinda funny.
Seems more like they don't understand the non-impact of piracy. No studies have shown it actually hurts sales, but several have shown they it actually helps. Most Mangarock users I know also used it to read manga that was not legally available. So they'll just go to a different site. They need to actually license the stuff no one else licenses in order for this to make a real difference to their (current) user base. |
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zrdb
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If a person wants to read manga there are still plenty of free sites.
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chronos02
Posts: 274 |
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So they're basically pulling a Dumping strategy, which is an anti-competitive practice, but without the negatives since they got revenue from advertising and their product cost is zero. They have fidelized plenty of people and now that they're transitioning to what appear to be completely legit practices, they will keep a chunk of the users as customers. This is essentially what CR did back in the day, as well as FAKKU. It's honestly hard to believe that the market regulation organisms are fine with this, if it happened with a physical store, the owners would already be behind bars.not because they dealt with pirated content, but because the practice of this strategy is banned, even if they do it inadvertently.
If they had done everything with the support of the scanlator groups, and without going the advertising AND the SUBSCRIPTION route, by taking advantage of both the scanlators and the ignorance of the readers, as well as obviously the mangaka and everyone involved in the actual products, then maybe, just maybe, I would've hoped them smooth sailing, but no, they went full-on greed and not only did they steal ad revenue from the licence holders (this is ACTUAL money made from people getting ads on their screen while reading manga from their site, it's not a "potential sale" bs most licence holders pull when talking about piracy losses), but they also had the gall to create an app, make it go past google's or iOS's (forgot which) checks, and ask for a freaking subscription fee! After knowing all of this, I honestly hope they flunk, and HARD. |
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zunderdog24
 Posts: 362 |
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Are these guys for real? |
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Firefly251
Posts: 387 |
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and fact that 99% of stuff I read never gets to my county let alone in my language :/ |
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Ensaru64
Posts: 52 |
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This is very funny. Scanlations by themselves are not a completely bad things. If anything, they're what made manga as popular as it is. Japan didn't even attempt to expand the industry past their borders back then.
But it's very ironic that Mangarock is trying to make it seem like they've turned over a new leaf. It's even worse since they made money off out of their hosting site. |
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Puniyo
 Posts: 271 |
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More like "existing readers don't care about the impacts of piracy". I never understand this moral grandstanding of piracy, just admit what you're doing instead of trying to dress it up as a good thing. That was true like 10 years ago when free, legal alternatives didn't exist. Not anymore. And you know no one's complaining about scanalations of unlicensed manga without translations. That is the only situation in which money is genuienly not being lost. A lot of scanlation groups take their responsibility of stopping projects and distribution once a title is licensed seriously and do a good job, but others simply don't care about the artist of the series at all and do it anyway... plus MR also used to have scans of the official translations of ongoing series too, which isn't even a scanlation issue. That's straight-up stolen. Sounds like they're going the crunchyroll route, which tbh, will be great if they do it right. Buying digital manga per volume is often more expensive than just buying the print editions, and SJ is, aside from only having SJ titles, only available in the US. We need a proper subscription service for manga that releases the same way Crunchyroll does anime. Last edited by Puniyo on Mon Sep 09, 2019 11:45 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Fluwm
 Posts: 1097 |
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It's worth remembering that the worst thing about scanlations is manga-streaming sites just like Manga-Rock, which steal scanlations and sell them to make a profit. They're no different than the dweebs who used to download fansubs, burn them onto DVDs, and sell them on eBay. What made scanlation justifiable, or at least defensible, back in the day was that there was no profit motive. Sites like Manga-Rock took advantage of that fact and ruined the whole scanlation community. |
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Blanchimont
 Posts: 3613 Location: Finland |
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You can't really blame them(scanlations) for that. With a few exceptions they(streaming sites) tend to steal the official releases as well. Removing scanlations from the equation won't change that fact. |
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overlordrae
 Posts: 95 |
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It's not just scanlations that they took, they scraped a lot of webcomics(which you could ALREADY read for free) without permission, probably making more money off of ads than the creators have ever seen themselves.
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Megiddo
 Posts: 8360 Location: IL |
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Curious to see if yet another Crunchyroll maneuver works itself out amongst the fandom.
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nargun
Posts: 931 |
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It's not the fandom they have to worry about now, really: a go-legit effort relies on getting legit content, which relies on the active support of the rightsholders. [too-long-didn't-write: they're franxxed. For various reasons, like "if you want to go legit you need to make the first move" and "there are obvious trust issues that MR hasn't handled at all well here" and "they don't have anything to offer that can't be done by people who are better-placed wrt the first two points". Crunchyroll's business proposal must have been stunning.] |
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chronos02
Posts: 274 |
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What CR had was vastly different from what MR has. They had managed to create a complete infrastructure for streaming purposes in an era where only the great giants had the know-how and the pockets to do it. They had also gathered an incredibly huge amount of watchers, and they were the only reasonably well established streaming site for anime back in 2006-2007. However, the content uploads were mostly handled by individuals unrelated to CR, contrary to MR which has an absolute control over that, meaning, they couldn't be held responsible for what people were uploading using the laws from back then, and it was one of the major points of criticism by Funimation and some other companies when they went legit and got a huge injection of capital to expand. The cases are similar, but completely different in both the environment and time, as well as the specifics surrounding them. Summing up, the proposal CR must have had was not "great", but rather "unique" for the time. And well, obviously very targeted. |
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aereus
Posts: 578 |
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What a crock of shit. Only after they're busted do they decide scanlations are "bad" and seek to drive people to buying more manga?
This is the exact same thing Crunchyroll did: Get busted and decide to "turn legit" and try to profit off all their site hits/popularity being from aggregating fan translations they had no hand in making. Don't give these people a penny, they don't deserve it, just like Crunchyroll doesn't deserve it. Except CR is the cancer that keeps on giving, because their cherry-picking of only the streaming and merch rights means lots of shows miss out on a physical release now because there isn't enough profit in only the disk sales. |
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