Ken Akamatsu and J-Comi

It's easy to forget that the problem of anime piracy isn't something confined to the North American market. Piracy in Japan is just as bad. I mentioned in a previous article about Yana Toboso, creator of the Black Butler manga, and the emails she would receive from Japanese fans who had illegally downloaded her work.

 Ken Akamatsu, creator of Negima, announced that he was starting a site where out of print manga and doujinshi would be posted online for free. Just recently, he posted some comments on twitter commenting on illegal scans.

Akamatsu suggested on Tuesday that illegal scans have "fallen into the category of 'property of the Internet'" and that it will be impossible to eliminate them. "The only thing we can do at this point is [launch our own free websites with the] 'advertising model.'"

Original article at Anime News Network

The website, J-Comi, which features a mascot very similar to the ermine Chamomile from Negima, launched on November 26th of last year. Unlike illegal manga scanlation sites, which display each individual page of the manga as a jpeg image, J-Comi provides high quality PDF downloads of it's content. Akamatsu himself has made his hit manga Love Hina available on the site.

While the website is currently only in Japanese, hopefully and English language version of the site isn't too far away. While it will be impossible to stop people from downloading the newest and latest manga illegally, hopefully by providing a free alternative, it will cut down on how much illegally obtained content people are viewing.