OneManga shutting down

[Epsilon]

Morganni wrote

Personally, I'd have no objection to Disney holding the copyright for Steamboat Willie until the sun explodes, as long as it's always possible to buy a copy at a fair price.

Of course, under this principle, when a work becomes unavailable for sale (or when they refuse to sell it to a population), they lose the ability to prohibit non-commercial distribution. (I want to say "immediately", but I suppose it's really better to have at least a three month grace period.)

Doesn't quite cover all the bases, but I think that would strike a nice balance between allowing creators to benefit from their creations, and ensuring that works which are no longer economically viable don't fade from existence in the long term.

My personal favorite idea is to make copyright universal for X years (i prefer 25, but would accept terms like 10 or 5), then after that you start charging a liscencee fee for each additional year you want to keep it out of public domain. IP is like land title, you don't own it forever, you keep it in the public trust. So we should tax it like we do real estate. You have to pay tax based on the suggested worth of the land, even if you aren't selling it. Thus you incentivise either allowing things to go into public domain or keeping them commercially available (to pay the tax).

Why
do you have to read the manga scanlations to do that. I can find
spoilers for series without ever going to a scanlation site. I follow
Bleach and Fairy Tail up to current releases without once downloading a
scanlation.

Because of course reading a summary provides the same experience and
entertainment value as the actual work! Why, I'll never have to pay for
another movie ticket again, I can just read the summary on wikipedia
instead!

Or you could download it instead! I'm never going to have sympathy for any argument which amount to "I want it, I will take it."

He asked for a case where availablity of fansubs killed a market.

... Who asked?

You're right, it was Morganni who made the claim that the long term benefits has never outweighed the costs. Sorry.

I find the argument that the only way to get free previews of manga is through scanlations to not satisfy my burden or proof.

Not sure anyone's saying it's the only way, full stop. It is, however,
pretty universally effective, in that it works for manga that haven't
been released in your region, or for people who only have bookstores
available where they frown on such extensive browsing, or the store
doesn't have the title you're interested in...

... Okay, so. Bob reads some scanslations of Negima online, decides it's
awesome and spends a couple hundred dollars on the official releases.
Alice goes into a bookstore, thumbs through a few volumes of a few
different things, decides Negima is awesome and spends a couple hundred
dollars on the official releases. Who is being harmed by the choice of
one set of actions over the other? Maybe whoever bought the stuff Alice
looked through and didn't buy, if she didn't wash her hands first.

Everyone is being harmed.
I believe in the social contract. That is, we all agree when we become members of society to abide by the Social Contract. Part of that social contract is agreeing to abide by the law. This is why theft is bad. It's not because it deprives people of their possessions (because otherwise taxation would be bad) but because it violates the Social Contract. Once you start violating the social contract you begin to break down society as a whole. Doug may pay for the original work, but by endorsing fansubs and scanlations he is supporting an entire subculture who does NOT endorse those actions. For every Bob that reads every issue of Negima at Onemanga and buys the releases religiously there are dozens, hundreds of people who do not buy the original work. There are people who are selling the product of Negima without giving a red cent to anyone involved in its production (and this is definite because Onemanga sells ads to their site).  He is harming the value of the Negima franchise, he is putting money into the pockets of IP pirates, he is using up bandwidth and energy that could be used for other purposes, he is draining money from the advertisers to support pirates. There is LOTS of harm going around, but you don't see that because its all externalized. None of it hurts Bob directly, but it does hurt.
If Bob goes to a guy in an alley and buys a copy of Haruhi on DVD for a suspciously low price, who is he harming? He fully intends to buy the whole series (if he likes it) so the fact he's supporting someone who is illegally copying and selling works without compensating the creators is OK, right?
This isn't comparable to the bookstore read or the library read because we have agreed, through the social contract, that those are acceptable ways to gain access to materials. If the bookstore owner doesn't want you reading his work, he'll say so. And I find the idea that I'm going to catch some horrible disease from the person who touched a book before me absurd.
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Epsilon