Pet peeve #37564:
Scanlators who advertise their works in public communities, but require that you friend their personal journal to download anything. Maybe I'm a little weird in the translation community in that I really don't care what people do with my scanlations. Redistribute them, retranslate them, put them on Youtube as a slideshow, erase my name and replace it with your own... I don't care. The original work does not belong to me. I didn't draw it. I'm not being paid for it. And I don't feel the need to safeguard the "copyright" to a couple hours of my time, freely given, that I spent translating someone else's work and dicking around in Photoshop. Locking download posts is just a cheap way to increase the friend count on your journal, which is one of the many ways that scanlation groups show off the size of their e-penis. (Other methods include tacking on several pages of credits and shout-outs to every chapter, watermarking every page, and harassing rival groups. Being a scanlator is like being in high school all over again.)
The groups that claim they're locking posts "to protect minors" are even more obnoxious... there is nothing to stop people from lying about their age on the internet. If a minor wants to see porn, they can go to Google Image Search. Locking a few pages of hand-drawn, heavily censored nudity is not "protecting" anyone from anything. It just provides an opportunity to "tut, tut" at the loose mores of other scanlators. Worst of all are the scanlation groups who require people to comment and beg for a password or a secret link in order to download the manga. I just imagine some basement-dwelling loser pretending that the comments are from actual friends.
Free sharing, whether it be of files or information or time or TMI details of one's personal life, is at the core of internet culture. This is not the place for cliques and popularity contests. Get a life.
The groups that claim they're locking posts "to protect minors" are even more obnoxious... there is nothing to stop people from lying about their age on the internet. If a minor wants to see porn, they can go to Google Image Search. Locking a few pages of hand-drawn, heavily censored nudity is not "protecting" anyone from anything. It just provides an opportunity to "tut, tut" at the loose mores of other scanlators. Worst of all are the scanlation groups who require people to comment and beg for a password or a secret link in order to download the manga. I just imagine some basement-dwelling loser pretending that the comments are from actual friends.
Free sharing, whether it be of files or information or time or TMI details of one's personal life, is at the core of internet culture. This is not the place for cliques and popularity contests. Get a life.