Ides of manga

Here’s the story of the day: 11 Japanese artists are suing the owners of a website that hosted scanned-in manga. ComiPress picks up the story from the Japanese papers. Plaintiffs in the suit, which is asking for 22 million yen in damages, include Nagai Go (Devilman), Saitou Takao (Golgo 13), and Inoue Takehiko (Slam Dunk). This civil suit is the latest development in a case that began last year with the arrests of the three men shortly after their website switched from a free to a paid model. They had only taken in 2 million yen at the time of the raid. Back in 2006, one of the proprietors of the website, Muramoto Toraji, tried to explain:

“To promote the manga cafe, we showed 1 or 2 pages of each title, but I thought if we were going to get caught infringing copyrights anyway, let’s show all of them. I thought we could pay the copyright fees later.”

At the time they were arrested, they had scanned in 17,000 volumes.

Simon Jones comments on the latest market news in Japan; his take: the market isn’t shrinking, it’s spreading into different media. (Link is, as always, NSFW.)

At the MangaCast, Ed comments on the latest manga news and shows off the latest yaoi offerings from 801, while new member Julie (of Mangamaniaccafe fame) checks in with a list of her favorites.

Reviews: Active Anime’s Holly Ellingwood reviews vol. 3 of Oh My Goddess! and the stand-alone book The Day I Became a Butterfly. Down at the Mangamaniaccafe, Julie checks out vol. 1 of Vampire Knight. Connie reluctantly reads volumes 4 and 5 of Astro Boy at Slightly Biased Manga. And at Let’s You and Him Fight, Jones gives his take on Banya: The Explosive Deliveryman.

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Comments

  1. stoooopid… scanning in one or two pages to promote a manga cafe probably would not have gotten them into much trouble…does japan have anything like “fair use laws”?…scanning in 17,000 volumes on the other hand

    wait…17,000 volumes!?! at 150-200 pages per? They scanned in 3 million pages of manga!?!