I've been thinking about this a lot today, actually.
A subscription model would *probably* work -- if you're talking about the licensed rights holder being the one offering the subscription. If you're talking about scanlation groups doing it, you've just moved them firmly into piracy-for-profit territory. I don't think that's what you meant, though.
The other idea that occurred to me would be for the industry to embrace the scanlation groups, but offer limited content. Which is to say, a scanlation group is authorized by a license holder to freely distribute their translation, up to x% of the overall published total. For example, if Hot New Series A has 12 issues published in Japan, and the limit was 20%, then the scanlation group could legally put out 2 of those issues without running afoul of anything.
This would give the license holder exposure, and it's easy to monitor the ruckus and see if it'd be worthwhile making the investment, while at the same time legitimizing what the scanlation groups are doing and removing them from the "pirates are bad, mm'kay?" viewpoint. It would also, I suspect, result in some very strongly targeted market research, but that's a side effect.
I don't know if it's feasible and obviously there's nothing stopping bad apples from just putting out everything they can get their hands on, but for middle-of-the-road types I think it has potential. And lowers the risk of entry because the license holder can see in advance how popular something is, without having to pay a cent to dip their toes in the market. The scanlators are going to do it -anyway-, after all.
--sofaspud
--"Listening to your kid is the audio equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, Spud." --OpMegs
A subscription model would *probably* work -- if you're talking about the licensed rights holder being the one offering the subscription. If you're talking about scanlation groups doing it, you've just moved them firmly into piracy-for-profit territory. I don't think that's what you meant, though.
The other idea that occurred to me would be for the industry to embrace the scanlation groups, but offer limited content. Which is to say, a scanlation group is authorized by a license holder to freely distribute their translation, up to x% of the overall published total. For example, if Hot New Series A has 12 issues published in Japan, and the limit was 20%, then the scanlation group could legally put out 2 of those issues without running afoul of anything.
This would give the license holder exposure, and it's easy to monitor the ruckus and see if it'd be worthwhile making the investment, while at the same time legitimizing what the scanlation groups are doing and removing them from the "pirates are bad, mm'kay?" viewpoint. It would also, I suspect, result in some very strongly targeted market research, but that's a side effect.
I don't know if it's feasible and obviously there's nothing stopping bad apples from just putting out everything they can get their hands on, but for middle-of-the-road types I think it has potential. And lowers the risk of entry because the license holder can see in advance how popular something is, without having to pay a cent to dip their toes in the market. The scanlators are going to do it -anyway-, after all.
--sofaspud
--"Listening to your kid is the audio equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, Spud." --OpMegs