[X] My Assistant

Cleary you think life in the stone age was less complicated than today and lacking today's choices.

I do think a stone age man never had to choose whether to analyse a semen sample using fluoroscopy or DNA analysis...

It doesn't seem so to me, and they had all the tropes we could put into any new creation today, the problems they had were just different.

So you think some stone age man thought "Wow, wouldn't it be weird if like, all the stuff that we see was in fact made up of little bits of smaller stuff. And those little bits were made up of even smaller bits. Cool."

Possible. I sort of doubt it, but possible.

Where it starts getting really unlikely is that some stone age man had a crazy thought like that about every wacky idea that has turned out to be. Not necessarily the same stone age man mind you, although to be fair there wasn't exactly a lot of them.

How about quantum physics? A round earth in which everything is drawn to the centre. In fact, I doubt they'd imagine dimensions higher than 3 at all. I doubt they'd think of computing devices, given that they probably haven't even invented abacuses yet. Satellites. The fact that there's radiation that we can't see. And so on.

And that's just the things that are true. You're also claiming that they had all these ideas, AND all the wacky ones that were wrong. Every crazy social situation, many of them involving things that didn't exist to a stone age man.

The fundamentals of human relationships probably held true. This is why Shakespeare and other classical literature is still so relevant despite being set in a very different time. But there's a lot of stuff that goes on outside of human relationships. And even human relationships have likely evolved somewhat. If we evolved from monkeys, then at some point we probably had social situations similar to monkeys too. I think we may have grown a little in that respect, towards new and different social behaviours.


Moving back to the real topic:

You never have to create somewhat regularly, or at all.

You sort of do. An artist who doesn't create anything is not really an artist. You must continue to create in order to continue describing your profession as "artist". When you stop, you are an ex-artist.

In the society in which we live, people exchange money for goods or services. Without a good or service to exchange, it becomes difficult to earn money. There are exceptions to this, and they are essentially patronship, either by a single person or by a group of people.

Patronship is a great idea, and if you're one of the artists that has a patron or patrons then great. If you don't though, you need to ensure your income by other means. Selling a product is tried and true, because there's always a certain number of people who will buy your product even if it's awful.

All good points. So I ask again, why do you still think I'm screwing them over?

You said it yourself.

I know many of them think so...

Do the wishes of others for how their works be used mean so little to you? Maybe they could make more money/be more successful by doing things in some other way. If they choose to explicitly forgo that option, is it right of you to force them?

You know how much even good mangakas make from their publisher contracts?

Good mangakas? Plenty. Your average mangaka? Surprisingly little because of how competitive it is to get the position and it's semi-mythical "dream job" status. Which is either here nor there really given that we're discussing doujinshi artists who by definition are non-commercial.

Hmm.

So you think some stone age man thought "Wow, wouldn't it be weird if like, all the stuff that we see was in fact made up of little bits of smaller stuff. And those little bits were made up of even smaller bits. Cool."

And similar. These are all inventions and understanding of the world. Ideas. Science, mathematics, and so on. As far as I can tell, pretty much everyone agrees that these are non-copyrightable and non-patentable, as ideas. What is subject to copyright is expression of ideas, that is, they way they're put into form. Businesses basing their income on copyright monopolies are trying to extend copyright to cover more and more, like processes and ideas, instead of particular instances of their expression. The trouble with ideas is that they're not unique and don't exist as a whole - they are formed from previous, earlier ideas, combined together. Newton's law of gravity was a consequence of previous knowledge that things fall down, combined with the knowledge that Moon goes round the Earth. These were present before Newton. I'm pointing out that if be move to copyright ideas, we'll have to determine chunks of earlier ideas new ideas were based on, and get back at least to stone age to ferret out all the basic ideas everything else was built upon.
You're right though in that Newton combined previous ideas into something new. Now we'll just have to determine what percentage of that was his own contribution, in order to determine how much of the money for things exploiting law of gravitation should flow to his descendents, and how much to descendents of the person who first understood that things fall down (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif)

Does it make any sense yet? Copyrighting of ideas...

You sort of do. An artist who doesn't create anything is not really an artist. You must continue to create in order to continue describing your profession as "artist". When you stop, you are an ex-artist.

Yes, much like nose picker has to continually pick his nose in order to stay nose picker. Otherwise he becomes "ex-nose picker".
Why even consider such a category as "artist"? It doesn't simplify anything in the world. It can't be used to describe anything with more clarity...

In the society in which we live, people exchange money for goods or services. Without a good or service to exchange, it becomes difficult to earn money. There are exceptions to this, and they are essentially patronship, either by a single person or by a group of people.

Patronship is a great idea, and if you're one of the artists that has a patron or patrons then great. If you don't though, you need to ensure your income by other means. Selling a product is tried and true, because there's always a certain number of people who will buy your product even if it's awful.

And the present give us the opportunity to have big group of people as patrons, as the following. Big enough so that they don't, as a whole, exert any pressure on the artist's freedom to create.

Observe the recent Kickstarter record: [www.kickstarter.com] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/667108...-fine-adventure . Tim Schaffer, of the Manias Mansion/Monkey Island/Full Throttle/Grim Fandango/Psychonauts/Brutal Legend fame, was continually told by his fans to make another point-and-click adventure game. He decided he'll call his fans on that. He asked for $400,000 to make a game and documentary of it, up front, on Kickstarter. You can see how much he gets in pledges now. People trust him to make a game they'll like based on the games he made in the past. He is going to get full freedom of expression, something he never gets with publishers worrying about profit on their invested money and interfering with creative process. He gets paid for the game, by 70,000 people, he won't get told what to do, and he can sell his creation in the usual way after that. And I expect him to put up more Kickstarter projects in the future, make a pitch like the ones he does for his publishers, but this time - directly to his fans.

This kind of thing was never possible in the past. But it's possible now. So it's no longer possible to consider patronage as something it was in the past, inferior to copyright as a source of income. Rules are changing. Methods and business models will go along.

Selling a product doesn't guarantee income one can live on, not without building reputation. Observe another product, a similar game, with nice pictures, with several names of reputation, aiming to make much less money: [www.kickstarter.com] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/atomic...p/feebles-fable

It doesn't look like they're going to get funded.

Everyone has to make an impact before they can make money.

The fact that some people are chosen by editors, picked up as a star, and garnered in marketing by big publishers doesn't make them more deserving fame. It just moves the feedback decisions from end-users to editors and publishers, makes end-users get less choice and less say in the matter than they deserve, makes publishers pick suboptimal authors and make less money on sales. And obscures the way it really works: artist, and his following. His reputation built upon previous things.

So artists play the lottery now, hoping to be picked by a publisher, rather than making sustained effort of bettering themselves, and making their work known directly to those who ultimately will support them.

You said it yourself.
Do the wishes of others for how their works be used mean so little to you? Maybe they could make more money/be more successful by doing things in some other way. If they choose to explicitly forgo that option, is it right of you to force them?

It's like with having children. When I see my child is about to put a hand into a fire, I'm going to try to stop it. And explain why that's no a good idea. When I see artists who clearly haven't thought the consequences of their actions through, and are working against their best interests, I try to avert losses, and to explain why the course of action they have taken is not going to do them much good. If they meant so little to me, I wouldn't spend any time writing about it - I'd just pirate things and not think about it twice.

Good mangakas? Plenty. Your average mangaka? Surprisingly little because of how competitive it is to get the position and it's semi-mythical "dream job" status.

Which is about how writers in USA operated until 2 years ago. That changed for good now. The change will spread. The space on store shelves is very limited. The space in a webstore isn't. Everyone will get fair chance to compete, with no gatekeepers who only let through the few artists they select.

Which is either here nor there really given that we're discussing doujinshi artists who by definition are non-commercial.

Well, pick one, then. Either we're talking about people who don't want any money, and they're doing it for the sake of it, in which case it's non-commercial, or we're talking about people who hope to get profits from the enterprise.

I think it's both. Doujin artists make doujins because they like it, they want to express themselves, but they're selling them to avoid losses on printing fees, and because they hope they will be picked up by a publisher, and thus will be able to draw fulltime, and to have fans and be appreciated. They're picking up following. Unfortunately, the special case of Japan is that they mostly don't care and don't want to hear about the rest of the world, and they behave as if the rest of the world didn't exist, and aren't trying to use the fact that people read them beyond Japan to their advantage. Why is it usually Western companies that go around in Japan asking for licences, and not the other way around? Why is it that only big publishers in Japan are trying to move beyond their country with sales? Perhaps they treat this gaijin money with contempt, and don't want to think about its source, but still, pecunia non olet...

I think we've deviated from the original argument a fair bit...

It all boils down to internalization of 'culture of sharing' vs 'culture of ownership'. Sharing or not sharing RAWs is good or bad depending on that.

If they bought the book and scanned it themselves to make their raws, they can do (or not do) whether the hell they want to do with their raw scans. No one is obligated to upload them and no one is entitled to see them. If you want them so damn badly, buy your own copy and make your own scans and upload them (or not) yourself. They spent the money to get them, you didn't.

Now, those who state that no one owes any favours for being helped, then they are obviously NOT part of fandom NOR does their attitude have any positive thing to do with fandom. In fact, their attitude is NEGATIVE towards fandom (anti-fan). Anti-fans, aka "Fans From Hell" have always existed, but that doesn't mean they should be encouraged at e-hentai. There is a difference between tolerance and encouragement. But from the past actions of the Chief Brony and the herd of hentai pony assistants, they neither want or tolerate Fans From Hell either. 10Brony engages in something the purists despise in that contributors receive gratitude for their positive actions. And of course, anti-fans receive negative gratitude in some cases.

Alpha 7 summed up the anti-tan attitude fairly well. Of course, that belongs to the category of idealistic purist ideology. Is that type of ideology the sole applicable approach to every situation that ever exists? From the way it was stated, it must be so. But if we are interested in understanding the various types of people in fandom, or this forum, examination of the underpinnings of such ideologies is important. Why are these idealists so upset by others being rewarded for contributions? To be fair, the rewards of being Ser Catgirl Camarilla By addressing the underpinnings and not the "bumper sticker ideological statements", we can be liberal enough to tolerate Fans From Hell.

One fallacious defense method employed by purists is that rewards for participation (versus rewards for no participation) should not exist. This can be said because it is very clear many purist comments contain either or both disdain and anger at fans receiving additional rewards for expressing their gratitude to the uploaders. Obviously, it cannot be worded that way because the purists know it makes them look selfishly ugly, but the de facto behaviour of such ideology is to encourage people to not participate or support fannish activities out of gratitude.

Purists have more than once stated everywhere from blogs to 4chan to here that feelings of indebtedness (gratitude) are bad and must be discouraged. Ironically, that implies sidereal non-fannish actions are also invalid to purists. For example, even Jesus was wrong with his Good Samaritan parable because shame was attributed to those who deliberately refused to help. The purists have often expressed anger at fans trying to make them feel shameful for being selfish.

As a temporary side topic, people point out that the parables and examples Jesus provided in the New Testament were only specific examples and not rules of behaviour. Hmmm. So these people mean to say that being Christian doesn't mean you should follow the teachings of Jesus? I had always thought that being Christian meant you followed Christ's teachings. Is there a parallel to fandom on e-hentai? Can you really be a fan, as opposed to being a mere casual consumer, if you do not behave as a good citizen of fandom? Can you really be a Christian, as opposed to being a casual world citizen, if you do not behave as a good member of Christianity? If the answer to either is yes, then it implies both have a yes answer. That would threefore mean you are a Christian if you follow the negative teachings such as the love of money is the root of all evil, you walk by people who are dying despite you being the only one able to help at that moment, and that you behave as a Pharasee or Satan worshipper; all though qualify you as part of Christianity in that case. Similarly, you are a fan then if you are a Fan From Hell, or continually go and tell Rinsako, Piotrus, JukanX, Friendsofsandwiches, A-Team, and others that they suck for feeling happy at receiving and encouraging compliments. Also e-hentai sucks for providing rewards to those who provide things; to be fair to everyone, Catgirl Camarilla belongs to every Fan From Hell and denial is a heinious crime that is worse than Sephiroth sending that liberal environmentalist Aerith Gainsborough to the netherworld. <-- Actually, the non-liberal attitude of the purists suggests that they would actually approve of Sephiroth more than they disapprove.

This is not a religious diatribe. But the previous thoughts were mentioned to illustrate how poisonous negative attitudes were recognized in different times of history and in vastly different scenarios than the relatively tame one of hentai fandom.

Getting back to the OP's comment including Chinese scanlation groups' overall policy to refuse to contribute raws despite consuming them en masse, I think that is also an anti-fan attitude. Because it seems to be an "institutional attitude" of chinese groups, coupled with various chinese groups deliberately putting out "lower" quality items if they do not have their group's logo on each page, there must be some common reason why this deliberately occurs. It is not a serendipitous occurrence but a deliberate one. Another thing is their tweaked uploading policy to discourage "replacement uploads" of galleries that have their chinese scanlator group's logo on the front cover; they also include a lower "half-sized quality" raw of the original cover. It is not half of the raw scan, but half of the logo version's quality. And don't expect belldandy100 or any other decensoror's credited name to survive the chinese scanlator groups' upload process. Suggestion: EHCOVE could have a side project where some of the chinese logoed uploads are replaced by a higher quality version simply be taking the chinese text and re-pasting it on the higher quality raw scan with the original scanner, decensorer, cleaner, leveler, editor credits restored. This would be for the items that were originally sourced by non-chinese sources. As for chinese sourced items, a substantial number of them were made on low dynamic range scanners. It is possible that the smaller pixel sized non-chinese scan remains superior in such a case due not only to the dynamic range preservation, but that leveling and cleaning effort are put into western raws from major scanlation groups.

There is no requirement that a chinese language scanlation must be sourced from mainland china is there? It's about quality, completeness, and deliberate halfsizing of filesizes while keeping the same pixel size as the western scan does result in a lower quality situation which can be resolved by the EHCOVE or Anonymous taking on a project to improve the quality situation. Revenge attitude is a problem, so a new member such as [www.rense.com] "ROC'king Pony" could handle the replacement uploads and [www.rense.com] "Formosa Pony" could handle deletion of obsolete galleries.

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Courtesy would dictate that you ask to use the translation...

Just so nobody's under any false pretenses about this Red_Piotrus guy...

He's been harassing everybody in Soba-scans with an account here for the last week or so to upload any raws that we haven't uploaded. We had no interest in getting involved in this debate but he's forced the issue by repeatedly PMing us and then when we told him no, he went around asking people in other groups to try and get them to ask us for raws so he could post them.

He's managed to get a few raws that we never intended to distribute somehow, and it's been really creepy to have someone persistently try and worm into our group just so he could go on his crusade. I just wanted to post this as a warning to other groups to keep your shit on lockdown because he has no sense of boundaries and will make up whatever convenient justification he can to access stuff that you had no intention of distributing. It's one thing to take one side or the other in this debate, but resorting to deceptive methods like this isn't a very effective way to make a point.

Has this happened to any of you other scanlators or is he just targeting us?

That is ridiculously intrusive and incredibly rude.

It is also harassment. Regardless of how you feel on the subject of uploading RAWs, I don't think anyone can claim that what Red_Piotrus is doing is right.

Where do you come off feeling justified to harass scanlators endlessly for their raws? What authority do YOU, personally, have to claim to deserve them? You are nobody.


This goes beyond the simple "Is it right or wrong to withhold RAWs from the community" and into "I want, so I do everything I can to take". You are no longer requesting, you're prying and harassing, and it is not polite.




(A bit random, but I used to be part of a LN translation group, so it irks me a bit to see mad disrespect)

Just so nobody's under any false pretenses about this Red_Piotrus guy...

He's been harassing everybody in Soba-scans with an account here for the last week or so to upload any raws that we haven't uploaded. We had no interest in getting involved in this debate but he's forced the issue by repeatedly PMing us and then when we told him no, he went around asking people in other groups to try and get them to ask us for raws so he could post them.

He's managed to get a few raws that we never intended to distribute somehow, and it's been really creepy to have someone persistently try and worm into our group just so he could go on his crusade. I just wanted to post this as a warning to other groups to keep your shit on lockdown because he has no sense of boundaries and will make up whatever convenient justification he can to access stuff that you had no intention of distributing. It's one thing to take one side or the other in this debate, but resorting to deceptive methods like this isn't a very effective way to make a point.

Has this happened to any of you other scanlators or is he just targeting us?

Gee, ain't you a ray of sunshine. Let's get a few facts straight. (Yeah, I know, that's the Internet, what do we care about those weird things called "facts"? Flaming is SO much more fun (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif))

My messages have been polite and respectful, following a simple boilerplate format I've been using for years ("Thanks for translated gallery x. I cannot find the RAWs for it, would you mind sharing them with us in the galleries"?). After identifying several Soba Scan translations that did not have public raws I have simply asked all people I know from Soba Scans to consider releasing the RAWs publicly. And yes, I tried to contact every Soba Scan member I could identify, it's not like there is a flow chart designating the official Soba Scan scankeeper anywhere I could find, and it's always reasonable to assume a good portion of people who I'd PM would be inactive or would not care. However, nobody was spammed, people got only one PM (unless they replied, in which case a conversation ensued).

At the same time, I was looking for those RAWs online and I found some quite easily, on the first page of the Google search. They were not labelled Soba Scans, nor did they have any scanlator credits I was able to identify. When one of your members asked where I found the raws, I told her that. In response, instead of a thank you for identifying a problem with the way the RAWs were shared (apparently the sharing site she thought was private was in fact public and visible to google), she started sending me impolite, flaming rants about how expensive/hard to get those raws were, and what a bastard I am for sharing her scans, and/or daring to ask her to do it herself (her last one used the f*** word rather heavily). I also had some more polite discussions with several other members of Soba Scans (kudos to you). Those conversations resemble the many polite conversations between reasonable people I had in the past, even if not all of them end up with the scans being shared (some people can politely agree to disagree, you know...). That one of the Soba Scans members (whom I'll not name, because unlike some others, I try not to harass people too much) seemed to have lost her temper and is, well, ranting about me and harassing me with PMs and complains is sad, but I don't think I am the one it reflects badly upon.

As far as I am concerned, this particular incident ended few days ago when she told me she has no desire to share the scans, but I guess she is now unhappy I dared to asked others about sharing the scans. Tough. I don't intend to ask Soba Scans for the raws anymore, if only to prevent any conflicts within their group, because while I got some people from SS telling me they would be willing to share the scans (if not for the fuss certain person is making), I also heard from others saying that they will make life difficult for anybody who shares those scans now (up to and including kicking them out from SS). Such power posturing is sad to see; I again appreciate that many SS members have replied to me politely, but I have no wish to cause those nice folks any trouble. Sooner or later, somebody will release this dojin, one way or another.

Anyway, I plan on continuing to ask translators who I identify as releasing only translations to consider sharing their raws. Politely, with a single friendly PM. In my experience, half will ignore it. A quarter will upload the raws. A quarter will politely disagree, for various reasons (which made me start this thread in the first place). One in fifty will go boinkers with some flaming rants, trying to stir a whipping frenzy that I dared to request the raws to be shared... (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) *shrug* That's the Internet we love (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

This post has been edited by Red_Piotrus: Mar 13 2012, 11:03

Seriously, on which page did this thread completely derail? I've only been keeping up till this point for the strongly opinionated views on everything, but now it looks like it's trying to get personal.

Seriously, on which page did this thread completely derail? I've only been keeping up till this point for the strongly opinionated views on everything, but now it looks like it's trying to get personal.

Doh. It's the Internet. Ad hominems are only to be expected, I am just surprised the Godwin's law has not yet been proven here.

That said, I'd be happy to see see more on topic discussion from Dlag and others. If there is anything remaining to be said... I think a good point has been made here about the culture clash (sharing vs owning), and about not enough empirical data to prove certain arguments.

I have a feeling that most of us will just have to politely agree to disagree, with the few trolls doing so in a more traditional, personal and flaming way (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I have a feeling that most of us will just have to politely agree to disagree, with the few trolls doing so in a more traditional, personal and flaming way (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

On one matter you didn't mention - I (and likely several other dedicated E-H people) would appreciate it if you didn't associate yourself with EHCove in communication where you ask for scans. It's your personal ideology and motivation, and your personal crusade, and not something related to EHCove.

On one matter you didn't mention - I (and likely several other dedicated E-H people) would appreciate it if you didn't associate yourself with EHCove in communication where you ask for scans. It's your personal ideology and motivation, and your personal crusade, and not something related to EHCove.

Agree with Dlaglacz. I have no desire to take sides and really do not want to be associated with this, either for or against.

Red_Piotrus, after a week of pestering me, of course I'd be really angry at you. You don't take no for an answer. You can pretend to be as innocent as you want, but the fact of the matter is you don't ask politely, you tell me people to upload raws, and if they don't, then you go into your whole thing how we're killing "your community."

You knew I said no, because you specifically went to other staff members, even encouraging them to specifically going around me saying things like, suggesting to not ask me, and just upload themselves as to not upset me. You also went to another group asking them if they'd get raws right from me so they could give it to you - which pissed them off that you thought they'd stoop to that level. The group may produce work that can be quite opposite of our material, but we still get along with them quite well and have helped each other with stuff in the past.

You specifically continued going to other people asking them to get stuff from -me- after I've told you that I was the scanner and that I didn't appreciate you coming to me with the attitude that you deserve the stuff because you sit on your behind and tag stuff all day and that you're just entitled to the material as much as we were after spending money on it, my time taking the book apart, my time scanning it, cleaning it up, having a translator translate it, another translator TLCing it, an editor editing it, and having the book QCed.

We translate for free, on a website that has no ads, requiring no money for people. If we ask for donations we offer raffles of doujinshi, and we've even raised money on our blog for the tsunami and earthquake disaster last year of $1,000 on our tiny little blog for Japan.

We try to communicate well with our readers, and we always try to be supportive of them. All the time I get emails from people asking if they can translate in a different language and I have absolutely no problem with them doing that and I always make it clear to them with it.

My last email did have 'fuck' in it with you. I told you to stop asking my staff members to go around me and upload our scans and asking other groups to get them from me, and that "No means fucking no" You then responded "Oh, stop bitching will you?" completely disregarding the entire week of me telling you no, and you specifically going to other people asking them to go through ME or around ME so you could get whatever you wanted in your hands. You knew I was the scanner, but that didn't matter what my response was - you'd do whatever it took to get material that's not yours.

I even told you I wasn't going to demand you take the raws that you got from us, because I flat out said it was our fault for not having the privacy settings on there appropriately. We then fixed that with the rest of our stuff, and I informed you that you had gotten lucky but it won't happen again.

The reason I was peeved, was because I spent over a month tracking the physical copy of that doujinshi, that wasn't being printed anymore from a Japanese auction site, before we could really use any raw providers, and spent $150 USD on it through a third party that shipped it to me. So again, if people want material that badly, they'll get it themselves. I had a user donate $200 to me privately, he didn't wish for his name to be disclosed, he just agreed with me that he wanted it and wanted to do his best to help me.

If you think that you're entitled to that material just because it's hard to find - tough. It was our work and effort, not yours, you're not entitled to anything.

I am so tired of your pms, youar harassment, and you not taking no for an answer. Since you can't figure out no means no - I will spell it out for you, because of your behavior and self entitlement towards our material. You are NEVER going to receive ANYTHING from Soba-Scans. No help - Nothing. No matter what group you ask, what member you ask, you are not getting anything.

I do not care if you think I am being rude, but your sense of politeness is warped where you go up to people and ask for it, assuming it's yours to have, and then complaining that I'm a hoarder and a hypocrite if I don't - then going to other people specifically to go through me or over my head to get the material. It's insulting.

We scan about 80~85% of our own material. We do not 'abuse EH' and even if we don't upload our own translated material, somebody else just does. So no matter what our material on here would be 'ruining your website' with all the ad revenue it produces for your precious website. As I've told you over and over - we are a scanlation team, not a raw provider. We offer high quality translations for English readers to enjoy, and it's not in our business model to want to provide licensed material, or Japanese material.

Believe me, if I could, I would take down everything of ours from here now, but someone else would just upload it. You have made me hate this website, from where I used to have a high opinion of it.

You have made me hate this website, from where I used to have a high opinion of it.

To reiterate, he's just one user, acting on his own... don't hate the tool because someone who likes it made you hate him.

I'm pretty sure we all know Piotrus well enough to know exactly what happened. He politely went through every scanlator he could find with any links to Soba trying to find one that would undercut Ziggy and take her scans. After which, I'd be fucking well swearing at him too. Clearly he doesn't take no for an answer, at least you can swear and take some of your anger out. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Have your own opinions about how scans should be managed, debate them, whatever. I can respect other's opinions, and we can all agree to differ and allow each to live by their own methods. Buy your own books and scan them to try and show others that your method is better, if you want. More power to you if you do.

But I'm not sure anyone supports you just taking scans from someone else after being directly told no. Nor trying to induce others to aid you in this. Moral obligation to share or not, that's just not cool. No community should tolerate that. Even if I thought sharing scans was very important, I'd be horrified by how you've gone about this. Disrespectful doesn't come close to describing it.


I tip my hat to all EHCOVE members who support scanlators being able to make their own personal decisions on this matter. You guys are all right. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) I do enjoy debating with you, even if we have differences in opinion. I do have a few more scans coming soon myself, but they'll probably wait until the translations are ready just so that I don't have to race other groups. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Well, that's certainly nice to hear. I'm not gonna prattle on any longer than necessary so that I can get some sleep, but Ziggy, I hope your opinion of EH shifts eventually. Even though i'm just an editor and only know your frustration very little, it's been very beneficial to me in my manga related affairs so I have nothing ill to say about it. =3

This post has been edited by Super Shanko: Mar 13 2012, 15:04

After identifying several Soba Scan translations that did not have public raws I have simply asked all people I know from Soba Scans to consider releasing the RAWs publicly. And yes, I tried to contact every Soba Scan member I could identify, it's not like there is a flow chart designating the official Soba Scan scankeeper anywhere I could find, and it's always reasonable to assume a good portion of people who I'd PM would be inactive or would not care.

You also asked a good deal of people to specifically go around Ziggy and release the RAWs on their own volition. This implies to me that you already knew our official response to the matter and didn't quite care since our opinions weren't your opinions. I find it hard to believe that you would ask our friends and members to go around Ziggy in this matter if you didn't already knew her response and were just cold mailing them as you claim.

I also heard from others saying that they will make life difficult for anybody who shares those scans now (up to and including kicking them out from SS). Such power posturing is sad to see; I again appreciate that many SS members have replied to me politely, but I have no wish to cause those nice folks any trouble.

I felt that my private conversation with you should have explained the basis behind this line of thinking, but it appears that I may have to attempt it again.

As a group it is our policy to not publicly release RAWs and it has been that way ever since I joined. If a member knows that we have this policy and decides to go ahead and just throw all of our RAWs at you anyway then obviously we wouldn't want that person to have access them anymore. Are you implying that if your EH gallery uploads were on a group privilege basis and you had a member of said hypothetical group that continually deleted the publicly available RAWs that you wouldn't remove their access? I don't think that enforcing policy equates to holding power above one's head, rather I feel that no organization can be truly successful if nobody respects policies and procedures.

This post has been edited by Tyaeth: Mar 13 2012, 16:21

As a further illustration about how you just modify your principles to fit the situation, your response mostly consists of "I'm being polite and they used swear words when they talked to me!" Maybe you're not a native English speaker but "polite" doesn't mean "avoid using swear words while prosecuting an ongoing harassment campaign designed to force a group into giving you what they want when they've told you no."

You acting like there are members of our group that agreed with you is absolute bullshit, one of our members who wasn't aware of the situation was trying to deal with you politely before we filled him on on how you've been needling us and everyone we know for a week or two.

Nobody should take this guy seriously, he acts like he's some pillar of the community and intellectual sage but he's just your standard entitled leecher who will go to extreme lengths to demand everything for free. We have to trust people and this site a lot less now because not only does he have this axe to grind, but he's persistent, creepy, underhanded, and dishonest in how he pursues his obsessive campaign.

On one matter you didn't mention - I (and likely several other dedicated E-H people) would appreciate it if you didn't associate yourself with EHCove in communication where you ask for scans. It's your personal ideology and motivation, and your personal crusade, and not something related to EHCove.

I didn't, and I don't. Like some have already said, I am doing it as an individual (and none of my PMs implied otherwise).

There seems to be an additional level to this misunderstanding, as the initial PMs asking for scans were sent about a week ago, some people apparently are not logging here daily, read them as recently as yesterday and by telling others something like "I just got this PM asking for raws..." might have given the impression I was sending them continuously, which is not the case.

Also, in her PM refusing raw sharing, Ziggy said, quote "You won't be getting any of my raws" and "you won't be getting jack from me" (emphasis mine). That implied her own decision, nothing was said about a group policy till after I send PMs to other SS members (having completed my review of their uploads, finding that there are also some other raws of translated Soba Scan content that are missing that have not been uploaded by Ziggy, and sending the respective uploaders the generic "please consider sharing your raws" message). It was only after I sent those several PMs that I was informed more clearly that not sharing raws is a SS group policy, at which point I made my statement (in this thread) that I won't be asking anybody associated with Soba Scans for them anymore. Till then I had no reason not to think Ziggy was the dissenting voice with SS group, and her refusal (twice implying it concerned only her scans and herself) should be read as the group policy about "Soba-Scans scans").

Anyway, as I have already said, I consider this issue closed, and some of us just have to disagree on certain things. I have no plans to ask anybody from Soba Scans about their raws anymore, as some vocal members of theirs made their point quite clearly that they don't like to release them, or discuss their release. I still respect Soba Scans for their work, even if some of their members associate me know with the Antichrist for daring to ask about the raws (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

This post has been edited by Red_Piotrus: Mar 13 2012, 20:40