MangaHelpers Removes Pirated Scanlations

Looks like MangaHelpers is the first scanlation-aggregator website to willingly comply with the threatening (though still informal) requests made by the recently formed multi-national manga anti-piracy coalition, as it agrees to remove all unauthorized / pirated scanlations and raw manga from its website. At the same time, they are announcing a shift of focus towards a new - and legal - manga publishing platform, called OpenManga.



Despite what certain other reports may indicate, the folks from MangaHelpers have not announced any plans to shut down their website, but on the contrary: they hope to "continue to be a hub for translators to collaborate, learn and receive feedback on their work and linguistic skills", and plan to improve their translators and scanlators services, by focusing more on the learning and teaching aspect. Which is rather ironic: training future generations of potentially-pirating scanlators, but not actually hosting their scanlations. Not anymore...

As of today, they have disabled public access to all raws and scanlations, as well as hosting / linking options for "publishers". Scanlators will still be able to access their files that are already in MangaHelper's system, in order to back up their work, but only until July 1, 2010. At that time, "all files will be completely removed for everyone".

Now, about that OpenManga project. After a lengthy outline of their creed regarding the free distribution of manga (and art in general), their announcement moves on to describing this upcoming platform as a place for "manga authors and artists to publish and earn money from their work, while still reaching a multi-lingual global audience. (...) A platform that supports an artist's need for an income, with the possibility of free availability to the fan".

Sounds rather ambitious, if not naive, but of course it would be awesome if they manage to make it work. The way they hope to generate income for artists publishing on OpenManga (and even for translators and localizers / scanlators) is from related merchandise, sales, donations and "other models", while retaining a free-access model for readers, as much as possible.

They say they've been working on the OpenManga project for some time now (at least half a year, if I got that right), so this shift of focus is not a consequence of the anti-manga... err... anti-piracy coalition's crusade. Currently the project is nearing a beta stage, so we'll probably hear more about it when it gets there. A "good luck with that!" is in order.