There is a trend currently were fan translaters are paywalling the latest chapters, with poor translations. What are your thoughts on this? I don’t mind asking for donations, but asking for money with mediocre translation is scammy.
Examples: https://asuracomic.net/ https://madarascans.com/ https://nightsup.net/ https://casacomic.com/
That stops being a fan translation at that point. (It also opens the translator up to much bigger legal problems)
I get wanting to charge, because it’s a lot of work (I’ve done cleaning, redrawing, and typesetting for a scanlation group) but that’s not how it works and is scummy. Also a legal liability.
I hate it…hate it…really hate it
Most of them are just machine translated work with little editorial. The only good thing about them is they came out faster than the official translation (which usually will be free anyway).
This is not a fan translation anymore, just plain opportunistic business venture.
I donate but I will not subscribe
Not really a fan translation service if they’re requiring payment.
Nothing in any of those three words precludes payment (it’s work after all) but it’s still notoriously scummy. A donation jar would make far more sense.
“Fan”
That’s the part that precludes payment. Fan works legally have to be free, that’s what makes it not copyright infringement.
That’s the part we have to combat. The idea that being a fan of something means any contribution you do to the fandom has to be treated as essentially unpaid workforce for the franchise. In truth, it’s nothing in the fact that you are a fan, but rather the fact that the thing you are a fan of is defended by some of the vilest scume of the earth (lawyers) that is a problem.
Down with copyright law!
People also shouldn’t just be able to make money off of other people’s creations without limits.
IMO, ideally we would implement a system of ‘open licensing’ where people could freely use others IP as long as they pay a public, standardized percent of revenue based on the usage.
as long as they pay
To who?
To the IP licensors? Nah. Pass. Prefer piracy.
To the creators? Arguably much better.
How to control intermediaries in those cases?
Also payment processor information usually requires KYC crap and puts people in lots of danger of fire from trigger-happy companies (or governments).
I should clarify it depends on your definition of fan. When you’re making a derivative work, there’s two versions. There’s fan which is The person is enthusiastic about the content and then there is the intellectual property variation of it, which is someone who is doing it for non-commercial reasons under fair use(or said countries equivalent). However, once you start requiring money for said process, it removes the protections the creator has shielding it and generally changes the definition to that version.
Additionally, I agree a donation jar would be much better, but even then it’s been shown that that doesn’t resolve all liability because fan projects have been taken down for having a donation button even though the project itself is free, heck projects have been taken down for having advertisements on the projects website despite having nothing to do with said project
I think charging money for pirated content is crossing the line. Once you do it for profit, you put a target on your back for the work’s author to aim for.
Rightsholders have to compete with pirates, but the inverse is true too.
Pirates typically win on price, but if they deliver a sub-par product, or make it more inconvenient to access, then it makes sense to go through official channels instead.
Yeah, history has repeatedly proven that piracy is largely a convenience/cost calculation. Each individual person will have a different way that they measure convenience or cost, but that’s ultimately what it boils down to. And piracy’s biggest benefit is that the financial side of the “cost” equation is low.
Maybe the cost has other factors that people consider, like time spent searching for decent sources, malware risk, potential legal issues, moral objections, etc… All of that gets lumped into the cost side of the equation, and weighted based on the individual’s unique situation. For someone like a 12 year old kid with no financial freedom, the “price” side of the cost calculation will be weighted very heavily.
Meanwhile, the convenience has its own factors too. Download speed, ease of access, quality of the media being consumed, etc… All of these factors get weighted and lumped into the “convenience” side of the equation.
It ultimately just boils down to “does the convenience outweigh the cost?” And if piracy becomes less convenient/more costly, (or legit sources become more convenient/less costly) then people will reconsider their decision.
