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Japan seeks international coordination to thwart online manga, anime piracy
(english.kyodonews.net)
Until they stop region locking their content, they can bite rocks.
this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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Why the fuck do they even do that?
Because capitalism
I get that Lemmy's (and Reddit's) favorite Bogeyman is capitalism, but the system of economics generally has absolutely nothing to do with region locking content.
Generally, content is region locked for reasons such as:
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trademark is already taken in the destination country and the IP holder doesn't want to register a new name
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traditional Japanese companies literally do not care about any market outside of Japan even if that market offers more potential profit
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the author doesn't want to sell to the destination country
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the destination country has content restrictions or censorship preventing sale of the work
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the IP is licensed to a thirdy party but the third party refuses to make the content available in the destination country for whatever reason
But the content creator generally has little to no sway in foreign licensing decisions, as the publisher ultimately owns that IP in its current form. E.g., When a creator writes a manga in a Kodansha-owned magazine, Kodansha then makes the foreign publishing and licensing decisions, independent typically of what the author may or may not want.
It depends. Sometimes the authors retain the rights either through a less restrictive publisher or through self-publishing and can set terms for their works, while other authors cannot.
In your example, Kodansha may own the right to publish the manga in their magazine but that doesn't always mean they own the IP for that manga. So if Kodansha decides to publish an issue of their magazine that has that manga in another country, they can, but they may need permission from the mangaka depending on how the rights were sorted. However, Kodansha may not own the IP rights and could therefore not release the individual manga. This is generally all stuff stipulated through contracts, and a particularly influential mangaka may get more leeway with a less restrictive contract over someone new or without a track record.
This gets even messier when multiple people or companies own partial rights to an IP. In those cases, usually one company just stops caring but refuse to sell their share, and the IP effectively dies forever.
My argument is that companies are offering money for the exclusive license to a work for a given region (i.e. licenses are sold on a geographic basis, or linguistic, in some cases), and thus the result is that there doesn't exist a single distributor globally.
There cannot be one single global distributor. They would need too much specific knowledge of trademark and copyright laws for every destination country, among others, in order to do that. Plus that would be a distribution monopoly, which in many Western countries is illegal.
It's not a distribution monopoly because the licensing firms then sell through other avenues (like how, for example, Seven Seas sell their books through Amazon, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, etc.). I'm notably omitting Yen Press and J-Novel Club in this discussion because they're wholly owned by Kadokawa (the latter I don't believe should have been permitted by the FTC, but what do I know).
I don't see how trademark and copyright law would be a hindrance. Any multinational company and any company with global markets has to gain this expertise, and they contract lawyers to do so.
Steam can do it. Bandcamp can do it. Netflix can do it. Amazon can do it. What is supposed to be so different for manga or anime?
For manga: if they provide a good way to read it in (human) English without region locking, there's no real problem. Something like MangaPlus works decently well for chapter releases. Something like MangaUp sucks ass. I buy volumes and am subscribed to MangaPlus. Most of what I pirate isn't even available in English.
For anime: stop with the idiotic exclusives and region locking, so there can be more services. CR needs to suck less and HIDIVE needs to open up their service to the rest of the world again. It's hypocritical to complain about piracy when you never intended to sell it here anyway. No money is lost. Similar to manga, I buy Blurays (that work with my player) and am subscribed to CR (unwillingly, RIP Wakanim) and Netflix. I pirate what's not available to me.
Will it solve everything? No, but it will for the majority
Video needs mandatory licensing, immediately fucking yesterday. Streaming services are a market failure. This situation is not good for consumers, and it's not even good for the companies. They tricked themselves into ruining an effortless money spigot.
For manga: if they provide a good way to read it in (human) English without region locking, there’s no real problem.
Add within a reasonable timeframe of publishing. Idk if this is a problem with manga but at least it's fucking ridiculous in light novels, where the English translation tends to be at least a year behind the original.
Years is obviously not good, but I do think we should be wary of wanting it to be as quick as possible if we don't want publishers to resort to machine translation (also known as A.I.).
I'm personally not too bothered by what you're describing. They can't always pick up everything when it gets published, so it makes sense to be behind. I'd pirate it at first too (for manga anyway), but once it comes out I buy it and reread it.
Maybe i should go ahead and download a few hundred gigs just in case the future needs me
Just gigs? You need some upgrades.
Absolutely do!
I might need you! Thanks for having the resources to do it.
Gabe Newell said it best, piracy is not an economic situation, it's an access issue. Why Netflix almost solved piracy until everyone split up
Slight correction: This is the case in the first world. In the third world (or at least in my country) it's very much an economic situation because 10 bucks is more than many families' electricity bill.
Also from a third world, but I am relatively very well off, and you are also correct, it is very expensive. Trying to do the beserk deluxe edition and one copy is worth like the poverty line income for one person. But still I pirated Berserk but I wish to support a now deceased author, rip Miura.
CR only recently came to our country but is like 2-3 the price of Netflix, so why would I support something with less content
Yeah, companies should do regionally based pricing adjusting for the local economic situation instead of basing their prices off western standards. As you said, 10 bucks is a lot for a lot of countries.
You wanna thwart piracy? Sell your shit outside of Japan. Seems simple enough to me.
The old dinosaurs sitting at the top will never learn will they
I read it as: hand your money to the corporate middlemen to get your fix. I'm more sympathetic if it's easier to legally get the stuff outside of a streamer or limited physical release.
It's equally insane that there's no easy way to get permission if you're a small timer who wants to make unofficial fanwork.
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