In the wake of last week's announcement of an anti-piracy coalition that includes over 40 Japan and U.S.-based manga publishers, reaction from fans and websites that host unauthorized scanned and translated comics (a.k.a. "scanlations") has been blowing up online forums and the manga blogosphere...
Nice to see some of the big English scanlation sites get taken down a notch. It's the super-popular sites like mangafox where the "average" fan pirates--the kind of people that don't visit sites like, say, this one--his or her manga.
I doubt it'll effect scanlations, but it should have a (positive) effect on sales, which is good to see. Even though I've given up on buying manga, long ago, and now mostly just hope for the light novel series' I'm interested in--Spice & Wolf, Full Metal Panic, Twelve Kingdoms, etc.
A required action, because if this went on we would have seen a situation where scanlation as a whole was targeted and many good sites taken down. The whole purpose of scanlation was to be able to read manga that were not available in English, but these big ad supported sites turned it into piracy.
Hope we go back a few steps here and return to the situation where scanlations groups actually helped the sales.
Also an N4G affiliated site with sensible people does not compute.
I am really happy they are going after these sites, and to think some of these thieves complain that they will boycott. Let them its not like they were supporting the companies so it will not make an impact. I hope the do the same with anime as well. They are loosing a lot of money from sites that upload episodes.