[X] My Assistant

Why are there fakku banners above fansubs?


gallery in question is from the poster doggerhotter title [Fatalpulse (Asanagi)] BOTTOM of the SKY content is fyorded

This post has been edited by Gon_O: Jul 25 2020, 03:56

Why are there fakku banners above fansubs?

Very first quote of the very first post in this thread. Get readin'.

oh, I thought this was only for stuff that they upload themselves and not stuff that has absolute no connection to them since it was translated by different people.
thank you for the fast answer though.

This post has been edited by Gon_O: Jul 25 2020, 04:20

oh, I thought this was only for stuff that they upload themselves and not stuff that has absolute no connection to them since it was translated by different people.
thank you for the fast answer though.

It has a connection to them, they hold the license and could easily DMCA it even if it's a fan translation. Instead they decide to advertise their version on it. I know which one I prefer.

I somewhat agree, but I think that's an oversimplification. You could argue the fan translation on its own is fine, but that can only exist if you have access to the RAW, which means piracy of the Japanese release. That's something the Japanese artists and publishers obviously don't appreciate.

Simply put, virtually all English speakers outside of Japan will not buy the Japanese raws if they cannot read/access them. There aren't many meaningful lost sales from the English market because they either don't even know about the work or wouldn't be able to enjoy it properly if they did. But there is a small increase in sales from people who read fan translations and go on to buy the Japanese raws.

If an officially licensed English version exists, then of course piracy is mostly harmful. But, if there isn't one, then fan translations can mostly benefit the creators because they increase their audience to include some portion of the English speaking market. It is rarely the case that an English fan translation is uploaded to the internet without there already having been access to the Japanese raws, since that is how a lot of translators find the raws in the first place. The existing Japanese market would just read the pirated Japanese raws and not the English version.

On the works I have translated and uploaded, I always leave links for where to purchase it legitimately. I believe this is the honest way to send appreciation to the creators, even if very few people end up doing so. However, those creators have sent me a lot of hate and anger because they believe I am only harming their market and stealing sales, even though they do not even have English copies of their work. Official translation groups like Fakku and Irodori are constantly telling Japanese creators this hurtful story about us, while also touting how friendly they are with artists they are fans of.

The only thing I want is for uncensored Japanese works (gender bender, specifically) to be made available to the English audience. I'm happy when artists I like sign on to reputable English publishers like Fakku because your mission is the same as mine. But I beg of you to please make clear to them the distinction between piracy of officially licensed works (whether EN or JP) vs. piracy of fan translations in inaccessible markets, instead of grouping us all together, since we are not the same, while we get badmouthed together.

Thanks for reading.

A lot of the vitriol is "false anger" type of trolling.

Which makes it really hard to combat when Facts and Logic proves to be ineffective. I fear that a lot of the vocal outrage comes from people who are willfully ignorant, parroting things they know aren't true to push their narrative. Then there's a much larger crowd of lurkers who are truly ignorant, and accept those lies without questioning anything. I've been an on-and-off lurker on 4chan since 2006, so I know how their threads typically go down. Whenever someone challenge their assessments, they respond by slinging insults, only to repeat the same falsehoods in the next thread. It's an echo chamber of the worst kind, and I've come to accept that certain places on the internet are lost causes.

As long as it's well sourced it becomes something that speaks for itself.

As mentioned above, I'm not so sure given the zealotry of these people. The most vocal detractors simply won't listen, and so much of the fearmongering is based on things that will happen. You saw it here as well with all the conspiracies about us taking over the site, and how this is a harbinger of terrible things to come. There's no way of proving that something won't happen in the future, and there's no shortage of new doomsday scenarios.

Is that [FAKKU only publish vanilla] an actual misconception people have?

It's actually one of the more common ones if you exclude the grand conspiracies. People say they don't want to support FAKKU because we only have vanilla, which would be a fair point if it was true. It's also a really hard point to argue, because there's no one definition of the term. We basically define it as romantic stories with nothing too kinky, and that applies to around 40% of our content. It's common, but by its nature it applies to "normal stuff," so you'd expect that. Either way, it's nowhere near the absurd claims of "over 90%" or "it's all vanilla" that you'll see online. Again, it's either willful or genuine ignorance.

See, this is a lot more of the type of thing I think FAKKU should communicate to people, or at least the community here for obvious reasons.

It does fall into that gray area though where it's really hard for a legit publisher to condone piracy in any way. There are prominent voices within the industry (anime/manga as a whole) who publicly say they'd never hire a former scanlator, and it obviously puts you in an awkward situation with the Japanese publishers and artists if you're "friends with the enemy." FAKKU is often accused of being hypocrites, for starting out as a scanlation site and now hating scanlation. Once again, this isn't true, and we're very aware of our roots. It's simply a touchy subject, and if we have to choose, it's better the pirates hate us than the creators in Japan. Hopefully we can somehow find a happy medium eventually.

Also if this is just gonna be about FAKKU in general you guys need get a payment processor that accepts cryptocurrency.

This is very off topic, but I'll be brief. The trend with crypto companies is to start out small and welcoming to everyone. Once they grow big enough, banks and CC companies get involved, and now it's in their best interest to kick out the questionable content. Some people are gonna love hearing this from me, but once enough money is on the table, it's unfortunately easy to abandon your old convictions.

Also why is it that no other site can have a tag system as robust as E-Hentai? Even just adding male and female namespaces would improve your UX massively, but I realize that's not something that's trivial to implement.

We are expanding our IT staff, so maybe some time in the future.

Just for the record, you did at least get one sale because of your posts and the banners. From me.

Cheers, I appreciate it.

Simply put, virtually all English speakers outside of Japan will not buy the Japanese raws if they cannot read/access them.

For hentai it rarely matters to me if its translated or not. Probably the greatest challenge, and what matters the most, is just getting me to see something, so that I know it exists and can decide if I want to buy it or not.

Which makes it really hard to combat when Facts and Logic proves to be ineffective. I fear that a lot of the vocal outrage comes from people who are willfully ignorant, parroting things they know aren't true to push their narrative.

This is a problem that most or all professionals face. I think you need to learn to ignore it, almost as a basic rule of professionalism. Businesses do the same crappy things and are generally in a greater position of power; it's a two-way street so they aren't victims here.

For this same reason, I think the current trend for professionals to communicate directly with their fanbase via twitter etc is ill-advised. In the old days, businesses would try as much as possible to keep all their thoughts and political stances to themselves.

Eh, I thought you'd have thicker skin than this. Seeing you still provide free samples despite the overreacting cries from multiple people who are most likely just going with the flow would have been a decent way to earn back at least some trust, but turning back and removing all the galleries you uploaded (despite that intentionally not being possible) just ruined everything again.
All I can say is that I'm massively disappointed.

Seems like the same question, but if I'm to elaborate on the topic as a whole: if piracy generated any considerable amount of money, I think more artists would embrace it, so I'm willing to believe their words here.

Not that it is going to change anyone's mind, but... are you familiar with the concept of a 'starving artist'? Artists are good at what they do (art) and not necessarily at selling or marketing their work. They may create great works - and fail to understand how to profit from this. There's a reason many world-famous artists like Van Gogh were literally starving: they were art geniuses and couldn't figure out how to make a good leaving on capitalist society.

Anyway, I would not take the artist's word on this. Many of them don't understand concepts like viral marketing or the difference between copying or stealing, or concepts like [en.wikipedia.org] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_sales . You can read or watch this [www.techhive.com] https://www.techhive.com/article/251930/the...acy_claims.html or something else, if you want an artists opinion: a column by a sci-fi American writer on why he supports giving away a lot of his works for free: [ericflint.net] https://ericflint.net/information/salvos-ag...st-big-brother/

Anyway, as far as I know, anime, manga and doujins industries are steadily growing (I am saying this on the basis of official sales estimates for the industry, and comiket attendance rates and such). So clearly, rampant piracy (like what you see on this site) is not hurting the artists, including hentai makers. Just like Hollywood is doing well (not just serving but reporting record profits) despite torrents still proving a free alternative to anyone. If sharing doujins or h-manga would hurt the artists, given the scope of what is already out there and free, they should be out of business, just like Hollywood. On the contrary, they are doing better and better every year. Now, does it happen despite piracy or because it helps? Given that none of us here, including your business, would exist without the piracy, none of us here would knew about or spend $$$ on it (I spend four digits easily on books for scanning etc.) I think the answer is pretty obvious. Piracy rocketed hentai to were it is (internationally, at least) and is still helping the artists (I probably wouldn't spend a dime on hentai content if I couldn't find it here first to see what is worth commissioning/supporting as I wouldn't have known this stuff even exists...).

----

I am sorry that you got so much flames, but you earned it - by issuing DMCAs and such, which was clearly betraying your own roots. It was actually cool you tried to do something good (share stuff here), but it seems you couldn't take the heat. If you endured it and kept on it for few more months, I think you'd see an increase in sales, as more and more people would follow the links and the community opinion of you would start changing. It is a shame your skin wasn't thick enough to wait longer, both for the community and for your own business. You had a good idea that could really be lucrative to everyone involved. Maybe it is not too late to try again rather than take your toys away after a few flamers and low-rated galleries? I know it is hard to say you were wrong, but you made a good step in that direction with your first shares here. I urge you to continue, for your own enlightened self-interest (i.e more profits)(IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) Seriously, if we can figure out how to channel more profits to the artits, I don't think most people will mind if you get a cut. Greater good and whatever.

This post has been edited by Red_Piotrus: Jul 25 2020, 12:22

For the effect of piracy [cdn.netzpolitik.org] https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/...ement_study.pdf

The proportion of people who illegally downloaded or streamed creative content while they are willing to pay the market price, is the lowest for films and TV-series, and the highest for books

[...]

The average willingness to pay for books is € 15.80. 19% of the people is not willing to pay more than the lowest price range, and 24% is willing to pay more than the highest price range for books. People seem willing to download or stream books legally but do so illegally because the book is not available online on legal sites, or to save out the money they would in fact have been willing to spend.

[...]

Overall, the price is one factor that helps explain the piracy of films and TV-series, but the price does not help explain the piracy of music, e-books and games.

I came here to post some namespacing shit and I see some FAKKU-related post dragging attention. Cool beans.

Warning: Goalposts being moved. If you expected a banner-related post, move on to the tl;dr or please don't waste your time and just don't read this.

Oh, we already know how to tell artists to stay away from greedy publishers. Don't worry, Red. And no company will stop us, no matter how big, rich or "threatening" they are.

I've been doing my part and telling a few thousand activists, contacting artists to ignore any and all company approaching them to preserve their entire rights as doujinka, and that they could get uncensored translations for free elsewhere. I've also been encouraging direct support, which literally means 100% profit directly to them.

Will people lose their job in said companies? That's not my problem. Stealing someone's rights under the pretense of international advertising and making oneself look like a big anti-piracy activist when piracy websites actually offer free advertising is no joke. I don't even want to get started about translation scams and the various takeovers over more than a decade. A few decades, even.

As the OP stated about shitposts, PMs will be ignored and redirected to /dev/null. This is not open for debate. Artists deserve 100% of the money, no more, no less. Ruining the doujinka concept should be a felony grade criminal offense.

tl;dr: Want to support an artist? Pay them directly. Not through a paywall or whatever proxy. Directly. Man to man. Or if you've got an issue with genders, individual to individual.

This post has been edited by Luna_Flina: Jul 25 2020, 13:11

I came here to post some namespacing shit and I see some FAKKU-related post dragging attention. Cool beans.

Warning: Goalposts being moved. If you expected a banner-related post, move on to the tl;dr or please don't waste your time and just don't read this.

Oh, we already know how to tell artists to stay away from greedy publishers. Don't worry, Red. And no company will stop us, no matter how big, rich or "threatening" they are.

I've been doing my part and telling a few thousand activists, contacting artists to ignore any and all company approaching them to preserve their entire rights as doujinka, and that they could get uncensored translations for free elsewhere. I've also been encouraging direct support, which literally means 100% profit directly to them.

Will people lose their job in said companies? That's not my problem. Stealing someone's rights under the pretense of international advertising and making oneself look like a big anti-piracy activist when piracy websites actually offer free advertising is no joke. I don't even want to get started about translation scams and the various takeovers over more than a decade. A few decades, even.

As the OP stated about shitposts, PMs will be ignored and redirected to /dev/null. This is not open for debate. Artists deserve 100% of the money, no more, no less. Ruining the doujinka concept should be a felony grade criminal offense.

tl;dr: Want to support an artist? Pay them directly. Not through a paywall or whatever proxy. Directly. Man to man. Or if you've got an issue with genders, individual to individual.

What a shameful fucking display from the community.

There's something really special in every scanlation group I've spoken to, it's almost ethereal but there's always a genuine spark of enthusiasm for the doujins they work on.

Piracy is not a uniform force for good like some people here have represented it as. Piracy only breeds sales when the community is receptive and supportive of those involved. And the people in the comments, the people with uploads, they made it very clear they had no interest in approaching that topic through F!. If the community isn't going to be supportive, it no longer makes sense for F! to enable pirates in any capacity.

I genuinely thought that other members of the community would, provided they were financially able, support an official English release of a work they like. People are too buried in their own nonsensical insistence that piracy will pay for an artist's rent, or incoherent rage against the public figurehead of a company.

When I saw the uploader comment that said the response had been good so far, I was elated. I thought in spite of the vitriolic ramblings in the comments sections that people were following the link and supporting the artists and translators who brought them the works they enjoyed reading.

I see some posts complaining F! takes a share and doesn't transfer 100% of the money to the artists. The artists are the quintessential creators of the works we read, yes, however; translation and typesetting are both artforms in their own right. Infrastructure, hosting, that's not free on a physical level. It takes hard drives, it takes internet connections, it takes electricity. Not to mention making the website to host to begin with. If the people in the middle don't get paid, they can't keep translating doujins and giving the artists the share they do give them.

All that being said, those who are saying they could've approached this better, yeah, they could've. On the other hand, they probably didn't expect this scale of negative feedback. By all accounts this should have been a positive PR move for them- mutually beneficial community outreach. The response they got is patently ridiculous by any conventional understanding of cause and effect. Predictable? Maybe. Rational? Oh, absolutely not.

I will acknowledge that the response wasn't universally negative. I myself made at least one pretty neutral or positive comment, and I know I read a couple others. If you're a member of the community and you didn't comment or contribute to making the comments sections of the F! uploads cesspools, the above rant isn't about you.

This post has been edited by derpface222: Jul 25 2020, 14:19

Like other users have said, I think pulling the plug so soon was premature - this was a business move, and it should be treated with a professional mindset disregarding personal feelings (and I really do understand how frustrating and demotivating reading the community response must have been). I participated in some of the comment clean-ups to try to control the community insanity - because it's harmful not just to FAKKU, but also to E-Hentai - but I think the disaster falls on the shoulders of FAKKU's approach.

I do think the vast majority of community concerns fall under three categories: misconceptions about who's issuing DMCA takedowns, Jacob's statements on Twitter about piracy, and sentiments about the honesty of FAKKU's intentions.

The first one is already covered by our new system - I think it might've been pertinent to wait a while to allow it to take effect, and let the community start to see the real actors, and not attribute every takedown to the FAKKU boogeyman.

The second - well, I think others have talked about that more eloquently and observantly than I could.

As for the third... that could have been (and perhaps still could be) addressed.

The way I would have done it would have been through an uploader comment more tonally appropriate for the community - I do think FAKKU in general are slightly out of touch. In particular that would have been acknowledging both a plan and a motive - that you were releasing a limited selection of uncensored material to promote content awareness and to increase brand recognition. I think it might have been wise to mention that there was an invitation after the banner system was updated - and that this was not a business deal with E-Hentai; just a sanctioned use of our gallery system.

I do think there is still something to be salvaged here - there is a definite product (original uncensored images, alongside the translations) and there is considerable benefit to FAKKU - if you want to build yourselves up to be the biggest western marketplace for legal hentai consumption, then having visibility in places where hentai is consumed is important. And despite what others have said in this thread - I do not think the average user is necessarily aware of FAKKU, and certainly not the drama around it. There are millions of lurkers who do not interact with the community or voice any opinions and are simply there to read and explore: these are the market you're looking for.

Think it over and consider trying again - but get some proper PR handling (and advise whoever ends up with that job to consult someone over here on how to craft a message that resounds with our community properly, rather than appearing blatantly out-of-touch - feel free to PM me about that sort of thing). Goodwill, patience and respect can undo a lot of damage - it's just a matter of waiting out the initial bad response. Don't rush it and don't expect immediate results - you're looking at a minimum of weeks, more likely months to years to gain both legitimacy and trust in the eyes of the community.

For what it's worth, I think if you'd slowly uploaded occasional additions, bit by bit, the vocal minority - the absolute turds thinking they're part of some righteous crusade especially - would soon realise their voices held no sway, and that FAKKU were here to stay as part of the system. But instead we now have those morons on IRC claiming they won and the secret deal fell through. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/rolleyes.gif)

This post has been edited by lestion: Jul 25 2020, 17:24

I do think FAKKU in general are slightly out of touch. In particular that would have been acknowledging both

They're not out of touch. They're feigning ignorance. This is something they planned from the start. [en.wikipedia.org] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_playing

I suggest you read the third paragraph from here: https://forums.e-hentai.org/index.php?s=&am...t&p=5726131

Piracy is not a uniform force for good like some people here have represented it as.

It really is, for a million reasons. It's not a uniform force of evil like you and some sketchy companies are trying to represent it as. You'd think shameless people like you would stop forcing this lie when observations and studies has disproven your nonsense but you're still doing it. You lot remind me about those modern flat earth societies with this persistent repeat of lies and delusions.
How are those restrictions and decreases of property rights and privacy rights to combat piracy working out for you? Must not be going so well when it's pissing people off and generating much less sales. What a shocker.

Do you know how Fakku started? Or Crunchyroll? Or any other legal streamer site? Do I need to draw black lines on a white page and let you fill it in with crayons to make it easier for you to understand? I'm all for it if it'll make things easier for you to understand.

The fact of the matter is that in a world without online piracy, you and everyone else would've never been able to explore and discover any of those artists from Japan. Guess what happens when an artist is irrelevant and nobody knows who they are? They don't make any money. That's how reality works. The person who made this thread wouldn't even be able to work in this industry if it weren't for piracy. Would this industry even exist in a world without piracy, or be as large as it is today? Nah. Do you have any idea how important businesses and employment rates are to the economy of a country? Actually, don't answer the last question because you clearly don't know the answer.

If you want to claim that online piracy is bad because it's causing companies to lose money in the current year, go ahead and prove it. I'll be waiting. I've actually been waiting for nearly three decades for one of you to prove it because that's how long your lies has been going on for and I've yet to see a single shred of evidence from any of you.
It's so damn tiring because people like you are suggesting that the liberty, property and privacy rights of others are less valued than your ego and lies.

The proportion of people who illegally downloaded or streamed creative content while they are willing to pay the market price, is the lowest for films and TV-series, and the highest for books

If I'm not mistaken, that's the study which the EU paid $428000 for and they suppressed it for years and tried to keep it a secret because the study's conclusion went against their narrative since they thought it could've been used to push for stricter copyright laws?

It's low for TV series because it's slightly too expensive for the average person which is precisely why Netflix is thriving because their prices are somewhat decent in developed countries.

From the same study: Overall, the analysis indicates that for films and TV-series current prices are higher than 80 per cent of the illegal downloaders and streamers are willing to pay.

For films? I assume the study is talking about theater films. I personally avoid theater films because I can't bring my own drink or snacks and I'm forced to buy their expensive products which is a huge turn off and it's not right to blame piracy for it.

Yep, it's that study. It's not the "EU" which doesn't make sense i.e. the Parliament (at least some) was quite surprised and angry to not have seen that. But yeah, that's the one some didn't want out.

Nope, film is what you'd call movie. Majority of professional call that film. I didn't quote that because it's different from what we have here. In the report you can see that a first illegal view can slightly improve a second legal view. Meaning that some people watch the film at home by streaming, and then buy it to watch it again.

Your quote however summarize the problem with film and TV-series, it's too expensive meaning the quality has decreased if we suppose people purchasing power didn't decrease. You can see however how Netflix & shit like that has changed the situation, people have mean of a cheaper service and thus went there.

It really is, for a million reasons. It's not a uniform force of evil like you and some sketchy companies are trying to represent it as. You'd think shameless people like you would stop forcing this lie when observations and studies has disproven your nonsense but you're still doing it. You lot remind me about those modern flat earth societies with this persistent repeat of lies and delusions.
How are those restrictions and decreases of property rights and privacy rights to combat piracy working out for you? Must not be going so well when it's pissing people off and generating much less sales. What a shocker.

Where did I say it was a uniform force for evil? Piracy in a historical context, and in a more limited modern context, are a quintessential source of anime/doujin popularity and exposure in the west.
If you mistakenly interpreted from my posting that I am anti-privacy, I can't really say anything to convince you otherwise. Let's just say I've done hundreds of pages of legal reading on important privacy court cases.

Do you know how Fakku started? Or Crunchyroll? Or any other legal streamer site? Do I need to draw black lines on a white page and let you fill it in with crayons to make it easier for you to understand? I'm all for it if it'll make things easier for you to understand.

I do. I haven't logged in or posted in at least five years, but I have a Fakku forum account under a different name. I've actually contributed releases as either an editor, proofreader, QC, or even a translator in one instance. I'm a member of the community, not some imaginary shill for you to strawman.

If I'm not mistaken, that's the study which the EU paid $428000 for and they suppressed it for years and tried to keep it a secret because the study's conclusion went against their narrative since they thought it could've been used to push for stricter copyright laws?

You are correct there was a study with suppressed results commissioned by the EU. The principal conclusion of the study was that there wasn't significant across the board statistical evidence to support the idea that piracy hurt sales, but in some cases it showed that it definitely did. In their study roundup they found negative correlation in 23 of 25 studies.


Overall, piracy can drive sales. It would be delusional to completely reject that as a concept. However, piracy driving sales is dependent on the community's engagement with the avenues of support available. Look at F95- creators regularly engage with pirates without condoning their conduct and they create a mutually beneficial relationship where they garner support from people they otherwise wouldn't. That's what piracy that drives sales and helps creators looks like.
It doesn't look like the comments sections on the releases Fakku posted. With the reception they got it just doesn't make sense to continue to enable piracy in any capacity.

On the works I have translated and uploaded, I always leave links for where to purchase it legitimately. I believe this is the honest way to send appreciation to the creators, even if very few people end up doing so. However, those creators have sent me a lot of hate and anger because they believe I am only harming their market and stealing sales, even though they do not even have English copies of their work. Official translation groups like Fakku and Irodori are constantly telling Japanese creators this hurtful story about us, while also touting how friendly they are with artists they are fans of.

Artists don't need us to tell them what to think, believe me. It's a completely natural feeling for an artist to not want their work stolen (not getting into the steal/copy debate; that's what it feels like to the artists). Just because you put love and care into replace the Japanese text with your own doesn't change the fact that their content is being distributed online for free, and the distinction between scanner and scanlator is not very relevant to the average artist. It's something I've had to grapple with myself. Out of the hundreds of translations I did, I can only remember one artist who embraced it and acknowledge what we were doing over here in the West. I'm very fortunate I now get to work on their content and do official releases, so that story had a happy ending. However, I wouldn't be surprised if many artists harbor resentment against me and the community as a whole, and I'd say that's understandable and justifiable.

We've been met with this kind of skepticism ourselves, and had several artists turn us down at first, given our history and because they believe everyone outside of Japan is a pirate—which to be fair, probably isn't too far off since the legal market is still very new. Most of them come around after hearing what we do now, or when word of mouth goes around and they hear good things about us from other artists. As en example, our planned guest for this year's Anime Expo (which sadly got cancelled due to the pandemic) started out as a friend of a friend who wanted us to release their doujinshi as well. In my experience, most artists are thrilled to work with you on official releases. They don't hate the West; they hate piracy.

In fact, I would encourage you to reach out to an artist you like and offer to do exactly that. That's basically what we do, and while we have a successful company behind us that adds a lot of legitimacy to it, we have partners on the site that are just a single guy or a small group working with or or two artists to put up a handful of releases. If you don't want to complicate things by turning it into a business, I imagine we could possibly handle that part of it and just send the revenue share to the artist directly—if you want to sell it on our site. And before anyone comes in calling me greedy: go ahead and take your share, but then you have to set up a proper company on your end first. If you do, you can sell it on whatever platform you want. Hell, as long as you get the artist's blessing, you could even post your releases on here with a link to the storefront if you think that's a good approach. I can't speak for other platforms, but I'm pretty sure we don't ask for any store exclusivity for third party vendors.

I should add a final disclaimer that I'm just spitballing here, and if you (or anyone else) wants to go through with this, you should contact us in a more formal capacity to get some proper confirmation on these ideas.

Piracy is not a uniform force for good like some people here have represented it as. Piracy only breeds sales when the community is receptive and supportive of those involved. And the people in the comments, the people with uploads, they made it very clear they had no interest in approaching that topic through F!. If the community isn't going to be supportive, it no longer makes sense for F! to enable pirates in any capacity.

This sums it up the current situation nicely. I only answered what I thought was a one-off question about piracy, and I didn't intend for this to turn into a discussion on whether or not it's good or bad. In my opinion, the most honest stance is to call it a double-edged sword. I don't feel this debate is relevant to the topic, so I won't reply to any comments trying to argue one way or another.

Like other users have said, I think pulling the plug so soon was premature

I do think the vast majority of community concerns fall under three categories: misconceptions about who's issuing DMCA takedowns, Jacob's statements on Twitter about piracy, and sentiments about the honesty of FAKKU's intentions.

I'd say the premature act was putting up the galleries. Until those other concerns are addressed, it doesn't come off as genuine. Putting up some galleries and hoping people will like us eventually feels like a lazy approach. As I've already mentioned, I've thought about doing something for several years, and I've gotten some decent suggestions from this topic that I might try. I think after a few other initiatives, and depending on how they are received, I'd be willing to give putting galleries on here another go.

...

We have been keeping this thread because it was more-or-less civil. If you start to place more wood on the fire then this is pointless. Either try again or just remove this post - no sensible group of people will accept "we will change our approach once you change your approach".

Overall, piracy can drive sales. It would be delusional to completely reject that as a concept. However, piracy driving sales is dependent on the community's engagement with the avenues of support available. Look at F95- creators regularly engage with pirates without condoning their conduct and they create a mutually beneficial relationship where they garner support from people they otherwise wouldn't. That's what piracy that drives sales and helps creators looks like.
It doesn't look like the comments sections on the releases Fakku posted. With the reception they got it just doesn't make sense to continue to enable piracy in any capacity.

Just something about that case, and I do think it's related to Fakku, if people aren't supportive of the legal release, it's not piracy fault. It's maybe because the legal release are not something people see value in.

The common counterargument is 'they don't like it, because it's not free. We can't compete'. The study has found that this is mostly false. Some people are willing to pay more (particularly in book, hence why I said it's related to Fakku), some others found that the current situation is too expensive (film/tv-series) for customers.
Are those people just living in an utopia where everything is cheap? I doubt. People are willing to pay money for what they think is worth it (I won't dwell more in that area, it's pure economy).

Maybe the real problem isn't the piracy, but what do we propose and why some people don't want it. I don't know if that's the case for Fakku, I don't know if you've got enough customers to not care about piracy, if you're not greedy, or if there is a piracy vedetta against you. I'm only saying this because we went into piracy 'philosophy'. I've no opinion in the current Fakku topic.