Forum - View topicComics and Digital Piracy
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agila61
 Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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It will be interesting to see whether this shows up in the different approaches to using fan translations to legally distribute manga below the threshold that can support the costs of a professional translation ... ... OpenManga seems to be more a full on crowdsource model, where DPM seems to be paying a share of revenues, and it may be that the two models end up on opposite sides of the line between "us" and "them" in the minds of some members of the audience. |
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musouka
Posts: 718 |
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Hetalia itself has been around for at least seven years. It was bound and made into a print volume in Japan after they noticed it had attracted a following and money could be made. As expected, the print volume did brisk business with its mix of strips culled from the site and new material. So this is not a case of having to wait and see for two years before seeing if it was commercially viable. Japan had already asked and answered that question with a yes. Hetalia was too risky for American publishers until they could be sure that it would be worth the investment. This is only logical, and I don't begrudge them that. But in this case, the fandom was the one that made the series the huge hit it is today, and that was through translating both the anime and the manga, but also doing typically fannish things.
The Hetalia printed volumes are not entirely old material. Some of the releases were also censored and changed from the original webcomics. Therefore your example of "translating from the webcomics" doesn't make sense, as that would only give you some of the material. Also, if this had been in the pretranslation stage for more than two years, I'm having trouble understanding why it still isn't ready for release. Why not strike while the iron is hot before fans start translating it in the first place? The livejournal Hetalia community, which acts as the hub for the fandom, was only created after the printed volume was released in Japan--two years ago. Market research should have been complete at this point in time. No matter how difficult Hetalia is to translate--and it should be significantly less so to people that have direct access to the company that released it and are more fluent in Japanese than people still learning the language--it should at most take a couple of months before the book is released over here. That means it should have been released about the same time as the livejournal community getting started. In short, what I'm trying to say is that it's not always a case of the companies being aware of every little thing that's going on in Japan. Sometimes it comes from fan demand. Manga magazines used to come with questionnaires, asking what series people would like to see licensed. This makes little sense unless you acknowledge that people have an easy way to read things coming out in Japan ASIDE from being officially published in English. |
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CCSYueh
 Posts: 2707 Location: San Diego, CA |
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How about people are often more attached to the first version they hear/see? Crispin Freeman related in a commentary CPM didn't realize Zel was a recurring character so when he popped up again, they'd lost track of the first actor/couldn't find him so they put Freeman in & he states he took flack for awhile for daring to replace the "original". (Not that the original English VA would be the original. Wouldn't that be Hikaru Midorikawa?) Look at the flak when ADV replaced Excel when it apparently came down to they wanted to speed up the release of the dvds while the VA claimed her voice couldn't handle it (although she started showing up in titles out of New York shortly enough). So I've always assumed fansubs are similar. If you see a name or a catchphrase one way in the subs & another in the official version, it appears the fansub fans most often default to their freebies are right & the officially sanctioned version is wrong. |
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LordRedhand
 Posts: 1472 Location: Middle of Nowhere, Indiana |
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Several factors, the biggest being is this going to fizzle out, what I mean in that sense is that there are other web comics in our neck of the woods that have been around for about as long that have not seen release at all in a print form.
Another again is the translation process itself, because we as anime/manga fans demand a close working relationship with the original rights holder that slows it down, we need to get the translation approved and have several checks involved, even if our publisher's translators kinda have a rough idea about how to go about it. Selling a rough translation won't do, and one that the original rights holder is unhappy with won't work either. Than you have to include anything legal (thankfully manga itself doesn't have a lot of them and I doubt Hetalia would come under scrutiny but still you have to look into these thing before diving in, as opposed to biting you later) And probably the biggest is the original rights holder(s) it's their work and what they say kinda goes with it, so if they don't want you to release until after a certain date, you don't release it. Finally it's the preference in licensing by the Volume than in Hetalia's case by the strip, we'd like to maximize profits by reducing costs and well licensing by the strip would be expensive in terms of a proposition, thus they had to wait for a volume to come out and license that. Considering how we've tried to do a serial format before (ala Shonen Jump, Shoujo Beat, and for a western equivalent Heavy Metal) and so far have the manga efforts fail (Heavy Metal is still around) means they aren't as keen to try something were it's just one (perhaps someone could license multiple web-comics or independent work to speed the process up a little bit, hey Openmanga) So there are several factors (some of which for quality control purposes we want) that slows things down, and when you consider that each rights holder has different demands (and if your going international each country has different laws and standards) of which as a distributor you would have to meet (and yes this includes if Japan's publishers do this "solo") So thus this isn't really an easy process though we can infer that those publishers and rights holders willing to put their works online are relatively cheaper when compared to licensing a print run. However an independent work will have "made it" if it gets a print run of some kind versus just existing online, because so far those are the ones we know of and are still around (much like indie flash/machinma cartoons, they got on TV/DVD to stay around.) |
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PetrifiedJello
Posts: 3782 |
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You are missing the point of my position.
No, I don't. If I want to listen to excuses, I'd find a 5 year old. EDIT: This quote was not targeting LRH, but instead, the excuses used by panels such as the one in this article. My apologies for any confusion. Last edited by PetrifiedJello on Tue Jul 27, 2010 7:51 am; edited 1 time in total |
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LordRedhand
Posts: 1472 Location: Middle of Nowhere, Indiana |
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PJ I guess you haven't heard of the phrase: "He who does not look to the past does not know where they are going." I feel that fits where you are.
Are you going to look at the explanations that a company gives and read all of them as excuses ignoring the fact that they are legitimate concerns and obstacles that need to be faced, are you truly that self-centered? Also musouka just because it is a hit or works in Japan doesn't necessarily mean it will work here, again actually sitting down and researching exactly what the series is is a way to save money as these companies have been around long enough to know what works but are careful not to license everything because a.) our market doesn't have the value enough to do that and b.) not all the series released in Japan will work here or for certain companies if we want to go further, it may simply be that we don't have a company willing to license certain works because the feel the market is not there despite their personal liking of the work/genre. |
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Sunday Silence
 Posts: 2047 |
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Supposedly, there would be issues with Conan the Barbarian. Don't ask why. Now, with Initial D.....the manga came out around the time the Import Scence was booming, and they felt by "westernizing" the manga, it would be more appealing to the customer base. Of course, when your target demographic is obsessed with anything JDM, can recite names of many Japanese Tuning houses and parts manufacturers, and refer to cars by their Japanese names a/or chassis numbers, someone in marketing (and translation) needs to be taken out to the back and shot. Oddly enough, TOKYOPOP had this DVD series called Street Fury (insert color name here) which acted like a "magazine" covering certain aspects of the tuning scene interlaced with some random plastic surgery import model.
Some sites (One Manga for example) made their bank thru Google Adsense. Some did ask for "Donations." To say the fans are the main cause is abit.....inflammatory? Call them cheap bastards all you like, but don't pin the blame squarely on them. Maybe I should be vengeful and see how she likes it if I bought her book of Comics she did from the Honolulu Advertiser and used it as how I see fit (like toilet paper). I already bought the book, so she has no right to tell me what to do with it.
I'd like to see hard numbers on this. Going alone by Soul Eater and Black Butler (which are way into the 60's chapter wise), I'd doubt you'd have fans flocking to buy your products when you essentially don't have 75% of the series in print or even translated. Plus, how do you define "sales coming from a legal dispute" vs. "OMG, NEW SOUL EATER CAME OUT, GONNA BUY BUY BUY!!" |
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LordRedhand
Posts: 1472 Location: Middle of Nowhere, Indiana |
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Now I know this may sound strange but when I referred to Case Closed my dad thought I was referring to Conan the Barbarian, so that name recognition confusion is very real. (Also it is imaginatively hilarious spoiler[ By Crom! The Murderer is you! Points and thrusts sword into suspect. I imagine the sword pommel to have a magnifying class at the end of it... ]
Well an author can't stop you from using the works as toilet paper, sunday silence they can stop you from distributing it against their wishes. So while nothing is stopping you from making a "back up" copy under fair use, you can't distribute said "back up" copy (and if you read fair use you can't technically sell/discard/destroy your existing copy either, as doing so ends your fair use to the work and you are to destroy said copy in such an event occurring, technically.) |
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Charred Knight
 Posts: 3085 |
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Two years is pretty short,it took Fullmetal Alchemist 3 years to get liscensed. I just checked and it took Soul Eater 6 years to get liscensed. Generally speaking manga series are usually not liscensed until the anime is out in Japan. The exception to this is if the author has had a previous hit series in America, such as Rumiko Takahashi. |
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musouka
Posts: 718 |
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The comic itself has been around in webcomic form for at least seven years, probably longer. If they wanted, they probably could have contacted Hidekaz directly and asked for his permission to print the webcomic in English, even before the Japanese publishers decided it was viable. |
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LordRedhand
Posts: 1472 Location: Middle of Nowhere, Indiana |
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You need to understand musouka is that how you would share profits in such an arrangement that you propose, as a company needs to pay their translate the works they do, so even if they followed the distribution format, there would have to be profit sharing involved someway. Add that the R1 market is favoring collections over 1 strip at a time, it's kind of a slow down in the process but it's happening on both sides of the equation.
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agila61
Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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Or more strictly speaking, gross revenue sharing, since the rights owners are on the one hand likely to be wary of betting on the commercial prowess of the licensor, and on the other hand net revenue or profit sharing has been historically prone to abuse with all sorts of unusual spending by the side handing out the share becoming "cost of business" and therefore coming out of revenue before the profits are shared out. A pure ad-based system would be comfortably compatible with pure revenue share royalties and with either crowdsourcing translations and translations as a share of the gross. A subscription system opens up the possibility of commissioning professional translations. I'd happily pay a subscription for manga with the images in a format that support panel by panel viewing apps, since the netbook that I use for streaming anime at Crunchy and Hulu is too small a screen for manga without zooming it up ... I just tried the Yen Plus Online, and even at its biggest zoom, text can be unreadable ... ... and the laughably primitive sliding of a browser window around that the bootleg viewers have to put up with is not appropriate if I'm paying for the privilege. If I have to use the desktop PC or my old Linux laptop to view the manga, that defeats the whole point, which is to sit in a comfortable chair, put up my feet, and unwind. |
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CCSYueh
Posts: 2707 Location: San Diego, CA |
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I sat in on a toy panel at CCI over the weekend where they stated they will not release their sales numbers, but it was nowhere near where the audience was guessing. It's not just anime & manga. A lot of smaller companies keep their sales info a deep, dark secret. Yen & Vertical are both smaller companies so I can see selling 100 more copies of a title is probably more noticable than over at Viz. The only reason I looked at OneManga's scan of Kuroshitsuji was because I was buying the Japanese volumes for the art but I can't read Japanese. I've pre-bought every volume Yen has issued & can see how people cut off from their free version would be more than willing to buy the Yen Press version. Guess what? It's better. Whoever did that scan OneManga had up missed some of the subtleties of the title. Yen's version is far superior & worth the money & with a certain amount of patience, one can get it for around $6 per volume from TRSI during a sale. Oooo, so they're ahead in Japan. Read more manga. I have followed as many as 50 titles at any given time & still follow enough I constantly have at least 25 books in my stack to read (I feel good reading a dozen, then 15 more arrive. I will never catch up.) |
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HellKorn
Posts: 1669 Location: Columbus, OH |
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agila61
Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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No, they are a small division of a larger company. That doesn't mean that they can just spend the parent company's money without earning it back. Edit: And, BTW, Viz now qualifies as a small company, though of course its Japanese owners are bigger. Last edited by agila61 on Tue Jul 27, 2010 6:51 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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