Epsilon Wrote:And why do you have the right to follow it immediatly?
Given the lack of demonstrated harm, why not? If you're buying the official releases, and thus providing your bit of financial support to everyone in the chain, where is the issue?
(Also, it really is more like years than months in a lot of cases. Especially if the company that was doing the official release stops. Looks like it was about four years between when Raijin Comics shut down and Tokyopop picking up Mamotte Shugogetten. Of course, I don't think that manga had a fan translation either...)
Quote:I've yet to see definitive evidence that fnasubs of MoHS masisvely increased sales. I tend to assume the reason that good series are successful is because (shock and awe!) they are good series. I have seen evidence where available fansubs decreased the marketability of an anime: the original Negima anime series flopped in the states because so many people had downloaded the fansubs and decided it was crap. Then there is the evidence of Taiwan and the massive illegal markets that grew up when no copyright laws were enforced and how much damage they've done.
Wouldn't your argument about quality and success run in reverse for Negima then, suggesting that even without fansubs it would have failed due to being crap?
The Taiwan situation isn't really comparable, due to the focus there on making items that mimic the actual product. It's not like OneManga was printing copies of things and selling them for $6 a volume. That would actually be displacing the market for physical copies, which people seem to want despite free (legal or not) digital copies.
Dartz Wrote:Never mind the bandwith needed to suck all that down must be hellaciously expensive.
Depends. In the US, for instance, it seems to be pretty rare to have such a thing as a monthly cap. More likely to just be a per-second rate that it can do, and a flat fee. What makes this sort of behavior interesting to me is that it's possible for someone to acquire things without a lot of conscious effort, or even an active interest in any particular item - given enough bandwidth, people will download things they will never actually consume, without necessarily even *knowing* that any given thing was included.
It's not quite like having books that self-replicate, but it's probably close enough.
Ayiekie - Will you accept the evidence of the Baen Free Library? The one where they found out that giving away free digital copies of a book resulted in selling large numbers of print copies?
I don't find the PC software market to be comparable on this issue, since the average piece of software functions the same whether bought, downloaded, or both, whereas those states lead to major differences in the experience with a book.
-Morgan.