Gee, I never realized *I* would need a pirate icon.

[mangaroo]

Given my acknowledged bias, this article -- 'Manga' industry worried cyberspace bootleggers may spread -- would fascinate me if it contained...what do we call those things...oh, yeah, DETAILS. Sheesh. Shouldn't news actually contain news? Like the names of the publishing companies involved, the manga that had been reproduced, whether the

Comments

[sara_tanaquil]

There was some interesting discussion of this article in ice_kristall's journal, over here:

http://ice-kristall.livejournal.com/39115.html

If the details reported over there are correct, part of the problem was that the operators of the site were using the lure of online manga scans to get people to pay for membership in their site/internet cafe/whatever, so they were directly profiting off the illegal use of scans. Pretty open and shut case of copyright infringement, whatever one may think about scanlations.

[mangaroo]

Thanks! Although the additional information isn't supported by references (yes, all of life is a research paper), it does help to fill in the giant void of detail in the Japan Times non-article. It's interesting that the perpetrators were also the proprietors of a manga kissa. There's no defense for what they did, but it makes me wonder if they were a more evident target because the industry is so wary of the effect of the manga cafes.