Manga Anti-Piracy Coalition

Until recently, the anime industry never made much mention of piracy, for fear of alienating their fans. With the exception of Greg Ayres, the industry made a point of ignoring piracy and not talking about it, silently hoping that the problem would go away. Well it didn't go away, and now the at least the manga industry at has decided to do something about it.

On June 8th of 2010, Viz media made an announcement that a multi-national manga anti-piracy coalition was formed.

San Francisco, CA, June 8, 2010 – Today a coalition of Japanese and U.S. publishers announced a coordinated effort to combat a rampant and growing problem of internet piracy plaguing the manga industry. “Scanlation,” as this form of piracy has come to be known, refers to the unauthorized digital scanning and translation of manga material that is subsequently posted to the internet without the consent of copyright holders or their licensees. According to the coalition, the problem has reached a point where “scanlation aggregator” sites now host thousands of pirated titles, earning ad revenue and/or membership dues at creators’ expense while simultaneously undermining foreign licensing opportunities and unlawfully cannibalizing legitimate sales. Worse still, this pirated material is already making its way to smartphones and other wireless devices, like the iPhone and iPad, through apps that exist solely to link to and republish the content of scanlation sites.  

Participants in the coalition include the 36 members of Japan’s Digital Comic Association, Square Enix, VIZ Media, TOKYOPOP, Vertical, Inc., the Tuttle-Mori Agency and Yen Press. Working together, the membership of the coalition will actively seek legal remedies to this intellectual property theft against those sites that fail to voluntarily cease their illegal appropriation of this material.

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 Original article at Viz Media

 Although relatively new, just the creation of the coalition has had an effect on piracy. Shortly after it's creation, two of the largest manga scanlation sites announced that they were removing all of their content due to the the stance taken by the industry against scanlation. If the top two scanlation sites removed their content simply because the manga industry decided to form a coalition against piracy, one has to wonder what the effect would be if the rest of the anime industry were to stand up and express their displeasure.

Earlier this year, a coalition of American comic publishers, including Marvel and DC, recently had the largest internet distributor of American comics shut down, with support from the FBI. Perhaps the Manga scanlation sites' swift action in removing their content was sparked by worry that the Manga coalition would soon follow suit, and shut them down in a similar fashion.

While the formation of the coalition and the scanlation sites' responses is brightening the outlook for the future of the industry, there has not been much news from the coalition since it was announced in June. As of yet, they do not even have an official website and other than the initial article detailing the formation, there is very little information about it. Hopefully we will see some new developments with them soon.

As always, don't pirate your manga and anime, and don't be a parasite.