[X] My Assistant

When I see a gallery that has only a translated version, not a RAW, I'll always PM the uploader and ask them to upload the RAW. Often, I get no response, on occasion, the uploader shares the scan (so it is not a total waste of time to bug people for such things - hint!). But few days ago, I had a really puzzling exchange with an uploader of Chinese galleries, representing a Chinese scanlation group. His English was poor, but as far as I was able to make the gist of his messages, he claims that for him - and most other Chines scanlation groups he knows - uploading RAWs is "wrong". At the same time, they appreciate our site as the source for RAWs, and as a distribution platform for their translations. He even offered to share his RAWs with me privately, for translation, but he would not want to see them released publicly.

I wonder if any of you have had this experience with Chinese groups?

All of Chinese translation group do not upload translation version with RAW.
And they don't have any income from the translation.

But if you want translate it by yourself (or your group), I can give you some(NOT PUBLIC!).

Maybe you can't understand.Really,you translation group always upload RAW,sometimes we translate your RAW to Chinese, The RAW you scanned are for the people all over the world.

But,our translation version only for Chinese (not people but language,you know ,someone in Hongkong and Taiwan).
They can't understand Japanese.

Sometimes some scanner would share their RAW ,but Translation Group do not!Look this,http://onanii.us/post/104
Maybe you can't read Chinese,here:http://i.imgur.com/O9kkT.png

This is a translation group named "楓色",means "maple-color",they have translated for 3 years
"我想你很少看到发汉化还带生肉的"
means "I don't think you can find a translation group upload their translated manga with RAW".

All Chinese group do this,not our one.

Remember,you can't make the RAWs PUBLIC,do not for business.
If you can't do this ,I'm sorry.

Thanks for the E-HENTAI and the provider.But...
Again, our translations only for Chinese,we don't upload translations with RAWs.Now and future!

You can say I'm a selfish man,but it's my and my team's principle.

P.S.:For me, GP is useless,I only want to hosting my manga to share with our readers.

I am not revealing his name, since the convo was technically private, but I find such an attitude not very constructive. They benefit from our site (a source of RAWs for them), they use it as a hosting platform, but they will not share the RAW scans. I am not sure why (as not to "hurt" the original artists?), but either way, this attitude seems somewhat hypocrytical (we will take what you offer, and use you for our purposes, but we will not let others do the same with our scans). The scanlator called himself selfish, and I do think he is right: if all shared such attitude, there would be much few translations, or dojins out there, and we would all be worse off.

In other words, if one has a scan and does not share it, but uses this site, I think one is quite hypocritical and selfish.

What are your thoughts on this?

I don't see a problem with that, since they're willing to share raws with other TL groups. The idea is that if you share the JP raws, the core consumer groups(the japanese) will be able to consume the doujins for free, reducing revenue for the artists. Other language groups are very unlikely to buy doujins anyway, due to obvious reasons, so they scanlate for those groups.

It's not like they said that they won't share raws with anyone else no matter the circumstances.

And assuming he or his group bought and scanned their own raws, he certainly isn't obligated to release them if he doesn't want to. Lots and lots of people don't like that (I could say a fellow group member of mine "experimented" with this not too long ago), but that's the truth of the matter.

Actually, I'm in favor of not releasing raws once a translation is done. At least not for some time, to allow time for doujin artist to sell his work and earn some money. After maybe 3-6 months, I'd then be more amenable to releasing the raws.

I'd have to imagine there's a difference between physical scans and stuff that goes up on places like DLsite. Physical releases for some groups are gonna do bank at Comiket or other events, maybe even sell out completely. And that usually means a decent profit for the circle/artist, and any possible online revenue is just extra.

Like with recent Bitch Bokujou I released, I think he does physical releases initially at the events, not that I've ever seen one, but pretty much everything we've been able to work with has come from dlsite. And since we've only released the English for now, we're not stopping the Japanese from buying the version they can understand. What's more interesting about this specific case is that his releases don't come out on the English side of DLsite, so we're definitely not cutting into any profits for the translation we did. And even if they did, like with those Amatsukami releases I also did, they're never translated anyway.

It's a very interesting topic, and it does happen with some English groups as well. I would also be interesting to find out how many Japanese visitors we get; I would hope they too understand that raws depend on people buying them, and due to how limited releases are, we depend on everyone buying as much as possible.

This post has been edited by BluMeino: Oct 6 2011, 04:46

Of course, we need to support the industry, both the official one and the dojins. I wish they had a paypal donation system, or such.

Then there is the interesting question of digital releases. I could understand not wanting to share a DL book, at least, not for the first year or so of its release. Most ebooks' profits come from this first, short period. Savvy ebook publishers then release the ebook for free, to facilitate viral marketing and word-of-mouth advertising, to promote the author - thus increasing the number of people who would want to buy his new release.

For the releases that have never been digitized, including most old stuff (how often do we find a C<40 release in the galleries), sharing it online can often be the only way to preserve it: I wonder how many dojins have been lost completely, published in few hundred copies back in the 20th century, most of them rotting in some unsold box in the attick of a former mangaka of a disbanded circle?

I am not sure what is the best solution, and surely, one size does not fit all. But for a dojin that has not been released online, and that has been released over a year ago, I'd strongly support sharing of the RAWs.

(Oh, and based on some older discussion and site stats - check Alexa - I don't think we have that many visitors from Japan, strangely enough...)

Well, once a doujinshi is already half a year old, it's replaced by the next major event. And since these are limited quantity items that are made to sell at the primary event, sharing online can only sort of help. Maybe a translator doesn't know how to contact a raw provider and just look for stuff to do blindly.

I have to disagree with them. If there was no distribution of raws, freelancers like me, not to mention the hundreds of other people that make a personal request to groups would be shit out of luck altogether. For me, other than *Ebay, there's no way i'd be able to acquire Raws of anything since some sites that do/would have what i'm looking for don't have international shipping or digital download for international customers.

Even when I once had some h-manga ebay store find the book I was looking for, it was 5x the price of all their other products (probably not their fault but it still sucked), so you can imagine the difficulty for folks like me..... The point is, without people uploading the raws of anything, it'd be way harder for freelancers (at least me) and the other random people that pay for a translation to get anything.

And what's the difference between uploading a *random language* translated version of something if it's still being scanned and uploaded.... and then translated again by a CH->EN->FR, SP, GR etc. ? *forehead smack!*

Red, i think you miss one important point, they scan it, therefore it is up to them to decide to release the raw or not.
And you also say they benefit from the site, well, i am not too sure it is the correct term to use, most of the raw is scan by japaness people, not people in here, here is just a place to upload the raw, not the place to make raw possible.
It is unlike without here then there will be no raw to translate.

I wish there was a Donate button on each raw Manga and Doujin gallery leading directly to the creators. Sadly, some people's ideas on copyright and current law seem to make this impossible.

So we have a broken market. And refusal to release the raw scans is one way people can think of trying to be fair to others, to fix it.

I don't know. Sometimes I think releasing raws with no stupid licensing schemes and no drms is the way to prod the creators to get out there and sell digital versions of their creations. Some already do - but rarely on non-Japanese pages. Why? Possibly they don't think anyone who doesn't know Japanese would want to buy such product. Then why don't they hire translators and release english translations? Possibly they don't care about the world beyond Japan much, and don't want to have to deal with it at all... I wish I knew.

Still I think it's more gain than loss that people are sharing their work, even if there are no reasonable channels available to reward the creator's efforts.

Shanko does have a point, without raws available to the general public, anything that gets translated is entirely up to the discretion of the translator and then systems like bounties and commissions would not be possible.

Depending on what timezone you live in, good morning! I'm still a bit groggy, so bear with me if I make any grammar mistakes.

I'm the aforementioned group member of AfroThunda's that "experimented" with not uploading a Japanese RAW. (Although I'm not quite sure why he used the word "experimented," lol.)

What happened in my case was that I uploaded a RAW (that I was working on translating) that I removed all the text from. Initially, I had no intentions of uploading a RAW of any kind before finishing my translation. However, someone had asked me to upload something/anything. I felt like I could provide them with at least that much while I worked on the RAW... this, surprisingly to me, ended up causing quite a bit of drama...



The way I see it is... well, I've been into this sort of thing for 11 years now (I've only been 18+ for the past 2 years though!) and I've seen a good share of sites/sources over the years, and E-H has been the finest site I've come across even if only for the tag system that it has. I have no particular reason to upload to E-H specifically, however the "H" community overall... I feel indebted to people that gather and share RAWs (note: if you have not uploaded anything that you scanned or bought nor have even thought about giving any sort of effort to obtain an unseen RAW with the means to share it, I'm not talking about you). For this reason, I feel some sort of personal obligation to share what I can, when I can. HOWEVER... yeah man, the artists need to eat.

While I'm not sure what kind of traffic E-H gets from Japanese visitors... what I AM certain of though, is that just one of them can and have taken RAWs that could only have been found on E-H and re-uploaded it to Japanese P2P networks (I've even seen someone on Share nicknamed more or less "E-H reup"). It matters not one bit where anything is uploaded originally (assuming it's uploaded somewhere seen by a decent number of people, any book title is google-able), it will find it's way around the web, one way or another.

Then this just goes into Piracy General - Do the people pirating pirate for "trial" purposes? Do they pirate because they're too poor to pay? etc. I can say assuredly that thanks to pirating I've been importing H-doujinshi ever since I turned 18. I'm not so certain that this is the case for most people......... at all. I don't expect too many foreigners (that are into this crap) to actually import doujinshi (due to the expenses of importation, and difficulty in finding the right contacts/methods for importing). Yet, I expect most of us, if not all of us, to have at least given it a thought at some point in time. Unfortunately, the thought alone won't get the artists what they deserve.

So, obviously, most of the money the artist makes will come from Japan. If there's no Japanese RAW floating around, it makes sense to me that they will make more (if only slightly, still more) than they would if a translated RAW was floating around. For this reason I see no problem sharing text-less RAWs or translated RAWs. Everyone can have the art at least (since I aim to release a translated version, it cannot be helped that everyone will be able to at least see the art...), but if the Japanese are interested enough that they want to know the story in Japanese then god fucking dammit, they can just go out and buy it for around 500 yen. Now, sometimes there are some doujinshi that just CANNOT be bought, maybe because it's an omake book or the doujinshi becomes sold out and it never gets restocked... which is why I'm all for uploading Japanese RAWs once the doujinshi becomes unobtainable...

"But if you want translate it by yourself (or your group), I can give you some(NOT PUBLIC!)."
While this is risky for the person sharing, I completely agree with this.
I assume most of the people coming to E-H cannot understand Japanese aside from a few words. So from the eyes of someone that can produce RAW scans, sharing a Japanese RAW when there is intention to release a translated version only does harm to the artist (assuming that the book can still be bought). As for translators, sure - give them the RAW so long as they don't go uploading it somewhere else, I would love to have some sort of system between all the different foreign translation groups to share private RAWs. Remember though, since most of the RAWs do come from Japan, foreign scanners only play a minor role in all of this. If they want to "help the artists" by not uploading a Japanese RAW then let them, it won't do any good nor bad, it's their book/scans to do with as they please.


Errm, at this point I've completely lost my train of thought, so I'll just end this here for now.

This post has been edited by wtfwowlol: Oct 6 2011, 17:50

Red, i think you miss one important point, they scan it, therefore it is up to them to decide to release the raw or not.

No, I agree it is their right to chose. As in: "it is their right to chose to be selfish, hypocritical users of our site" (with the note that I agree, delaying releases of digital items by up to a year is fair).

And you also say they benefit from the site, well, i am not too sure it is the correct term to use, most of the raw is scan by japaness people, not people in here, here is just a place to upload the raw, not the place to make raw possible.
It is unlike without here then there will be no raw to translate.

Well, the guy I quote said himself they sometimes use our scans as the source.

I wish there was a Donate button on each raw Manga and Doujin gallery leading directly to the creators. Sadly, some people's ideas on copyright and current law seem to make this impossible.

So we have a broken market. And refusal to release the raw scans is one way people can think of trying to be fair to others, to fix it.

I don't know. Sometimes I think releasing raws with no stupid licensing schemes and no drms is the way to prod the creators to get out there and sell digital versions of their creations. Some already do - but rarely on non-Japanese pages. Why? Possibly they don't think anyone who doesn't know Japanese would want to buy such product. Then why don't they hire translators and release english translations? Possibly they don't care about the world beyond Japan much, and don't want to have to deal with it at all... I wish I knew.

Still I think it's more gain than loss that people are sharing their work, even if there are no reasonable channels available to reward the creator's efforts.

Viral marketing and preparation of the future market. As you said, and I earlier, if we could easily donate some money to our favorite creators, many would. And they would not be our favorites if we couldn't easily get their work.

While I'm not sure what kind of traffic E-H gets from Japanese visitors...

Check [www.alexa.com] this. And I was wrong, either I misremembered things or they've changed recently: the site is quite popular in Japan (more than a global average, and more than a third of visitors come from there). Still, their forum participation is minimal.

Regarding the piracy argument, the key point to consider is that if people had to pay for stuff, they would simply not get it all, rather than buy it (or only a little of it) at given prices. To reduce piracy, one has to provide something at fair (low) prices. This is why itunes, hulu, netflix and such are good business models and are making profits, despite the fact that one could just torrent anything anyway. Till dojins will be sold for fair price globally, this won't change. Of course, there will be people who will download stuff for free - but again, those would be people who would otherwise not have it at all, or those who will, after trying things out, buy them (I count myself in this category, as I will buy products I've tried for free if I really like them).

On a final note, there have been examples when releasing an ebook freely online has boosted the sales of its printed version (because people will sample it online and decide to get a real copy for convenience). I am not sure how applicable it would be to dojins, who have a much smaller printed run, though (also, I find e-dojins much more convenient than hardcopies...).

I don't see a problem with it. It's not like anyone is entitled to any of this stuff.

I'd also like to point out that a lot of non-H groups actually buy and scan their releases. They don't take commissions, either. And amazingly beyond all expectations, non-H scanlation is actually far bigger than H. Who would have guessed that such destructive practices would result in a thriving translation community? Despite that H comics are actually fairly popular (sites like EH get an absurd number of hits), and there are plenty of raws available with decent quality scans.

The point being that there are a lot of factors at work, and people shouldn't be so quick to judge what's good or bad for the translation community.

but if the Japanese are interested enough that they want to know the story in Japanese then god fucking dammit, they can just go out and buy it for around 500 yen.

And there's the rub, these things just aren't widely and commonly available like your average manga. By far and wide, they can be considered exclusive releases unless they also go on DLsite. And DLsite is usually a supplementary market for doujinshi after the physical releases are sold. I guess it is left to the uploader on how to proceed, but then hundreds of books will never be seen by the general public because even with all of the translation groups in all of the languages, some artists are just favored more than others. Piracy, in this case, does make a doujin artist more popular to foreign markets. If people want a physical doujinshi, their best bet is to go to the event and it personally. Hell, a good number of artists sell out completely at a Comiket and never do reprints. The real question to me isn't whether you should do it or not, but how long should you wait before posting a raw to a less popular circle?

There's also the matter of doujins printed in very low numbers, in which case every last instance of the work might be thrown away and destroyed eventually, all without adding to the global culture. I'm against such works perishing - their place is in public domain.

We have to remember that every creation of culture that's not physical (ie. not a scarce resource) belongs to the whole community since the moment its creator first shared it with someone else, and copyright is only an utilitarian mechanism to promote creation by rewarding creators. I won't discuss if copyright makes any sense nowadays in times of Internet and culture of sharing, but in case of things which can be given to others without lessening the original instance, I feel we definitely have an obligation to preserve them, when they're in danger of vanishing, so they can eventually reach unfettered public domain intact.

The problem is that you're talking about obligation. I can understand that someone shouldn't be restricted from sharing in order to preserve a work in danger of vanishing, but I don't believe anyone is obligated to.

Also, this is doujinshi--amateur, self-published works. There are over 30,000 circles at Comiket alone, so you can guess the sheer quantity of manga that's produced. If you think each one is of such great significance that we're obligated to preserve them indefinitely, I'd hate to know how you feel about all the sketches that get crumpled up and thrown into wastebins and all the poems that are never jotted down.

I'm not against sharing manga. I appreciate the people that take the time to scan and upload the stuff, so people like me who don't have easy access to it can read it. But whether the work in question is scarce or not, I don't think you can say anyone is entitled to it.

Hi I'm new on this forum, but I want to post my 2 cents...

I'm a huge Japanophile and I'm into everything from J-Rock to dramas, idols, and (of course) doujinshi and hentai. I just discovered this site and I'm really excited about how much content is available.

I live in the US, and normally do not have access to doujinshi, and without sites like this, anime and manga probably never would have reached its current level of popularity in America. I'm sort of a purist when it comes to Japanese media... I enjoy reading (or trying to) them in Japanese, because I studied Japanese for 3 years, and it's a good way to keep my language skills up. I have a huge preference for subtitles over dubs in movies, because many times a lot is lost in translation. However, sometimes it's great for me to be able to just read the scanlations because I don't have to concentrate as much and I don't have to continually look up kanji.

That being said, having RAWs floating around the internet probably cuts into authors' profits. However, the majority of doujinshi authors are not established, and I'm not sure that the exposure to a much wider audience isn't actually a positive thing for them. Hopefully, most people will realize that it takes time and effort to create these things, and without financial support, it becomes a lot harder for authors to produce their works. I don't think that doujinshi has reached saturation outside of Japan, to the extent that someone without access to the RAWs would be able to feasibly buy them instead. So in my view, having an active community of translators (with access to RAWs) will eventually lead to more demand and make it economically viable for authors to export their works to the rest of the world.

So I can understand why scanlation groups would opt to only post translations of doujinshi instead of the RAWs, because it helps spread interest without potentially stealing an author's hard work. Like some people have already said in earlier posts, most of us want to support our favorite authors, and will when we have the chance. When I had a chance to go to Japan in 2006, I went to Comiket and spent around 30,000 yen on doujinshi, and felt great about being able to feed the starving artists!

Anyway, I think that's about all I have to say..

I don't think Dlag is implying we SHOULD share. His argument, I believe, is that SHARING is good, and should be recommended - but it is a free world, and of course one has the right not to do something. At the same time, one should not prevent others from doing things that do not infringe on one's rights. That's were copyright comes in: I think some short term copyright is needed to ensure the artists get their profits from the short-term monopoly it creates, but as I said above, a year should be enough. After a year, the works should be shared; and if we had a good infrastructure, all dojins would be scanned at Comiket and similar events, and automatically released by them after a year has passed. Of course, this is just another "if wishes were pennies", just like my earlier wish that J artists would have PayPal accounts, or the one expressed by somebody else that those accounts should be linked from our galleries (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

On a side note, here's a good model of how this kind of system can and does work: [en.wikipedia.org] Pioneer One - you can watch the show for free, and donate money if you like it. And it works! This is how dojins should be distributed, too.

This post has been edited by Red_Piotrus: Oct 7 2011, 19:20

I think it's too subjective to say what is best. If the artists want to share their works for free, they can and sometimes do. But I think it's on them to decide what's best for their personal interests. No one is doing them a favor by uploading their works without permission, simple as that. Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn't, but it isn't our call to make.