The powerhouse Manga distributor Shonen Jump has issued an threatening message to whom ever is participating in the illegal digital distribution of it’s published works, and thus “wound the souls of mangaka,” who have poured their soul out to create their work.
This is the message readers were beholding:
To our readers,
The Internet is now overflowing with illegal copies of manga. All of these illegal copies run counter to the wishes of mangaka. They also ignore the wishes of the creator as to how the manga should be read.
It may be done without much thought, but in reality it hurts the mangaka who pour their creative talents into these works, and it is also against the law.
When we discover such illegal copies, we discuss possible measures with the mangaka concerned and try to tackle the problem, but there are so many heartless people around that it is just impossible for us to tackle them all.
This is a plea to our readers. Illicit copies of manga harm manga culture, infringe the rights of mangaka, and most importantly of all they deeply wound the souls of mangaka. Please also understand that it is illegal.
From now on Shueisha will, in collaboration with mangaka, deal more harshly with any illegal copies circulating on the Internet.
We hope we can count on the unchanging support of all our readers in this endeavour.
Manga in it’s reading form hasn’t changed dramatically (if any at all) over the last decades and concern of it not being “read” in the traditional way thanks to the illicit file distribution is no real concern. If dealt the right way they could become successful at exploiting this new media, instead of letting the realm of digital distribution be the pirates domain.
In Japan most of the file sharing is still done through heavily encrypted P2P protocols. However, while that does sound somewhat safe for the distributors, lately technology to countermeasure this has been made possible and has already put well known P2P software on the surveillance spot.
