Three arrested for posting manga on the net

This article from something called TMCnet gave me pause.

An Internet cafe owner in Tokyo and two other people were arrested Tuesday on suspicion of posting popular manga comics on an Internet site without the consent of the authors and publishers, the police said.

The arrests, the first in Japan related to Net distribution of manga, came after the “cyberpatrol” unit of the Fukuoka prefectural police found suspected violations on a website dubbed 464.jp in October last year, according to the police.

The police say that all three admitted to scanning manga and making it available on their website without getting copyright permissions. It’s interesting that the arrests weren’t made until last week, shortly before the site was planning to shift from free to paid viewing.

Nine authors and three publishers have filed complaints about the site.

The copied manga included a police officer story, “Kochira Katsushika-ku Kameari koen mae hashutsujo,” by Osamu Akimoto, and a basketball series, “Slam Dunk,” by Takehiko Inoue.

(Interesting that Slam Dunk is one of the works in question; last year, the Japanese publisher Kodansha pulled its manga Eden No Hara off the market after the author, Yuki Suetsugu, was accused of copying from Slam Dunk. Seems people can’t keep their hands off it.)

This incident raises all kinds of interesting questions. As a writer who likes to get paid for my work, I appreciate the importance of copyright protection. When I was an editor, getting reprint permissions was an important part of my job, and I’ve always been a bit perturbed by the ease with which people scan stuff in and put it on the Internet.

Still, I see the sense of the first post in this thread on the Manganews Forum, which argues that scanlating is OK as long as the manga isn’t licensed to other countries. The logic is that you’re actually helping the author, because once a book builds a following it is more likely to be licensed, bringing in extra income for everyone. My own two cents would be that you’re unlikely to deprive the author of income because an untranslated manga is unlikely to sell many copies before it is licensed. On the other hand, I have no problem agreeing that once it’s licensed, scanlating is out of bounds:

when you scanlate licensed manga, you deprive manga-ka of their royalties. So do us all a favor: don’t scanlate licensed manga. And when the published version comes out in your country, support the author by purchasing the book. It’s the very least we can do.

It’s worth reading the whole thread to get some different insights into the question, as well as this rather dyspeptic view of human nature:

a majority of people will download things illegally even if they know that they are harming the companies, manga-ka, the whole Comic industrie. They would probably do this even if they knew that every chapter they downloaded killed a fairy.

After all, given a choice between paying for somehting or getting it for free, people will usually go for the freebie. And that is why, whether it is motivated by pure or venal impulses, it is illegal to steal someone’s work.