On the morals of fandubs, scanlations, and copyright: A response to the use of copyrighted materials

[liashi]

This began as a response to a concern about using small samples from copyrighted works for a weekly "Japanese←→English translation challenge" event we are trying to start over at japanese. I started replying to the concern with my own opinion on the matter, and then after I was writing for several hours I realized what a huge tangent I had gone off on.

Comments

[franzeska]

some basic tenants of fair use
I pronounce it like that too, but it's actually 'tenets'. Just saying. :)

Scanlations have been around in some form for decades and as a reasonably cohesive movement since at least the mid-90's. Publishers are going after OneManga and its ilk because those sites get exponentially more traffic than the old underground stuff, and many of them are getting significant ad revenue. I have yet to see a publisher go after individual amateur translators or even most scanlation groups, let alone people translating a couple of pages as an educational exercise. (As a matter of fact, there are tons of people who put their homework from translation classes online. Novels, comics, newspaper articles: you name it. I doubt anyone cares.) Sites get the occasional C&D letter, but I really think English language manga publishers have been remarkably restrained when it comes to their interactions with scanlators.

No one's going to have a problem with the translation challenge unless it gets used to assemble a complete scanlation of a series or something.

BTW, if you like fandom and lawyer-y stuff, you might find otw_news interesting.

[liashi]

Tenets, tenants.... XDDD Oh dear, they are indeed two different things. Looks like one of those spellings I need to be more careful with.

Thanks for the link, it does look quite interesting!