A Modest Proposal

[kiba]

Recently, there has been tremendous economic loss in the illegal manga scanlation market, caused by copyright holders who wishes to shut down the competition. This economic loss is mostly the loss of very convenient online manga reading websites. Sites that shut down their online reading service includes Onemanga, mangatoshokan, and mangahelper.

Factor in their failure includes:

1) Copyright law.

2) Angry copyright holders.

3) Failure to build relationship with the actual mangaka.


I propose a website that provide said convenient services, but without angering snotty manga publishers to the point of shutting down our sites, and build relationship and rapport with the people who actually produce the work, the mangaka. In addition, we will compensate the manga translators who make reading manga in English possible. Of course, this will involve bitcoins.


Business model:

There are several possibilities, which may or may not be combined:

1. We can create a paywall for mangaka who wish to put their manga behind and publish say, 30 pages for free as advertisement.

2. We can puts out entire manga for free reading by anybody and share the ads revenue with the mangaka and translators.

3. We could have paying accounts with premium features.

Jobs:

1. Japanese agent: Somebody who is fluent in japanese and is able to woo mangaka and explain bitcoins.

2. Translator agent: Somebody who is able to woo scanlation group and explain bitcoins.  

3. Programmer: Somebody who could write and maintain the web application.


Revenue sharing model:

1. 50% go to mangaka and translators.
2. 50% for everybody else. Alternatively, we could pay Japanese and translator agents for the number of successful recruits they made.



Unresolved problems:

1. No knowledge on how to price bitcoins to yen and vice versa. Yen to BTC exchange market needed.

2. Where do we get a Japanese person who know manga and bitcoins? There is also the issue of no known Japanese bitcoin using community.

3. Mangaka might think bitcoins is crazy. Maybe we could pay them in yen instead of bitcoins? Depend on problem 1.

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[BitCoinPurse]

Unresolved problems:

2. Where do we get a Japanese person who know manga and bitcoins? There is also the issue of no known Japanese bitcoin using community.

Satoshi Nakamoto?!?

[sabbers]

Unresolved problems:

2. Where do we get a Japanese person who know manga and bitcoins? There is also the issue of no known Japanese bitcoin using community.

Satoshi Nakamoto?!?

Thats a french name :-P (just kidding)

[Red]

Factor in their failure includes:

1) Copyright law.
2) Angry copyright holders.
3) Failure to build relationship with the actual mangaka.

Technically, you will need to build a relationship with the copyright holders. If they approve your plan it is smooth sailing. If they don't, you are in for a world of hurt.

In western publishing the author often assigns the copyright to a publisher. At that point what they want ceases to be of any importance to your legal standing. I don't know Japanese business conventions though.

So in the abstract, better make sure you knows who holds the actual copyrights. The music trading business has lots of examples of the artist putting works up in P2P systems and the publisher harassing people for trading said music "illegally."

[Insti]

Business model:

I'm not familiar with a lot of the manga related terms you used but it sounds like there is some copyright infringement going on.
I'm not sure how using bitcoins will make anything different. Are you just trying to make it harder to trace who does what?

[kiba]

Business model:

I'm not familiar with a lot of the manga related terms you used but it sounds like there is some copyright infringement going on.
I'm not sure how using bitcoins will make anything different. Are you just trying to make it harder to trace who does what?

The goal here is not to run foul of copyright laws, but to provide a legal, reliable, and convenient source of manga for the public in form of online reading sites. As it stand, these illegal online manga reading sites can get taken down anytime for copyright infringement.

It is a niche that needed to be filled.

[RHorning]

Business model:

I'm not familiar with a lot of the manga related terms you used but it sounds like there is some copyright infringement going on.
I'm not sure how using bitcoins will make anything different. Are you just trying to make it harder to trace who does what?

The goal here is not to run foul of copyright laws, but to provide a legal, reliable, and convenient source of manga for the public in form of online reading sites. As it stand, these illegal online manga reading sites can get taken down anytime for copyright infringement.

It is a niche that needed to be filled.

Please explain the copyright situation better here.  Are there artists and designers who would be willing to publish their original work in a new medium (on-line) and be willing to get paid potentially with Bitcoins, or is this merely somebody who has copies of the manga and has posted scans of this stuff?

The "legal" aspect is what I'm trying to get a handle on, and where the "copyright infringement" comes from.  If a site is "illegal" and "infringing copyright", it sounds like this is something that the Bitcoins aspect is irrelevant on.  If this is merely trying to provide a revenue model for artists that want to get outside of the normal publishing model, there is certainly something that Bitcoins can get involved with that can make them some serious money.

[kiba]

Please explain the copyright situation better here.  Are there artists and designers who would be willing to publish their original work in a new medium (on-line) and be willing to get paid potentially with Bitcoins, or is this merely somebody who has copies of the manga and has posted scans of this stuff?

The "legal" aspect is what I'm trying to get a handle on, and where the "copyright infringement" comes from.  If a site is "illegal" and "infringing copyright", it sounds like this is something that the Bitcoins aspect is irrelevant on.  If this is merely trying to provide a revenue model for artists that want to get outside of the normal publishing model, there is certainly something that Bitcoins can get involved with that can make them some serious money.

I do not know of any artists and designers in Japan who would be interested in publishing their original work online. Yes, we're trying to provide a revenue model for artists that want to get outside of the normal publishing model.

[RHorning]

I do not know of any artists and designers in Japan who would be interested in publishing their original work online. Yes, we're trying to provide a revenue model for artists that want to get outside of the normal publishing model.

That is the real trick then.  I would suggest that you consider perhaps even artists who may not necessarily be in Japan, but do work that would appeal to the manga reading community.  If you are a purist and think that such artwork simply must come from Japan or it isn't real, I would suggest that you are buying into a myth and would be willing to pay the "tax" that comes from getting stuff like this from conventional channels.

I'm not familiar with the manga publishing industry, but it seems from the description here that it is similar in nature to the RIAA and ASCAP in terms of how they squish down aspiring artists and really only exist to support the established artists.

The technical side of things isn't really so much of a problem (especially on this forum), but recruiting those who might contribute the artwork would seem to me as a significant challenge.  It would seem that you might be able to find some through social networks like Facebook or Twitter, but you should try and also see if you can figure out the sites that are typical in Japan too, or at least in Asia.  I would especially recommend South Korea as a potential recruiting area as they are very well wired to the internet, have some really amazing cartoonists/animators, and wouldn't mind "sticking it" to Japan on something like this too.

Getting customers isn't nearly so difficult, as the manga reading community is quite a bit larger and many of them speak English as a primary langauge (at least sufficient to make this a profitable enterprise).

[vess]

Actually, the Manga (and manga 'fan-fic') copyright situation is quite different in Japan than in America.

Japan has a much more tolerant view of derivative works than America does, as one example.

Also, historically with Anime at least, Japanese copyright holders have been happy to seed interest in their Anime in America through online trading. Anime filesharing has a long, occasionally uneasy relationship with these Japanese content creators. If you go to a site like animesuki.com, you'll see that they will take torrents down if Anime becomes licensed in the USA.

I'm not sure I have more to add of interest here, but it's not a good idea to apply RIAA/MPAA style thinking when you imagine Japanese copyright holders -- totally different culture.

[kiba]

Whatever the case may be, somebody, preferably those with some knowledge on how online banking in Japan works, will need to setup a yen/bitcoin exchange market.