Scanilation Site to Close Down

This Thursday scanilation site One Manga reports that they will be shutting down operations.  In June, Japanese and American manga publishers changed their stance on scanilation sites and began taking an active role in removing their content from these sites (reported here in June - Japanese and US Publishers to Fight Scanilation Sites).

"It pains me to announce that this is the last week of manga reading on One Manga (!!). Manga publishers have recently changed their stance on manga scanlations and made it clear that they no longer approve of it. We have decided to abide by their wishes, and remove all manga content (regardless of licensing status) from the site. The removal of content will happen gradually (so you can at least finish some of the outstanding reading you have), but we expect all content to be gone by early next week (RIP OM July 2010)."

While they are shutting down their manga scanilations, their forums will still be active until they try out some new ideas.  They also encourage fans to fan them on their new Facebook page.  For further details you can check out Anime News Network and ICv2.

Japanese and US Publishers to Fight Scanilation Sites

According to Publishers Weekly, Japan's Digital Comic Association and US-based manga publishers are combining forces to combat scanilation sites (30 in total) such as OneManga.com and MangaFox.com. These sites began in the 70's to bring manga over to the United States when not readily available. The publishers are finally taking a stand against these sites to protect their properties. Anime New Network has similar coverage of this story.

In the three weeks since, approximately 330 tiles have been removed from MangaFox (mostly VIZ titles) and several have been removed from a similiar agregator, OneManga.  Some of these titles have been removed by the scanilation creater ovver fears of legal action.  Some titles, however, have found their way back on to the site.

What makes scanilations so harmful is that the creators and publishers are essentially having their work stolen from them.  With the current economy, this makes a rough time even more difficult for companies.  Recenly, VIZ had to cut back 40% of their staff.  If we want to continue to have manga brought over to the US, we need to support the creators and publishers.