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Working on a new manga scans website, what about legal issues ?


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#1
rezgi

rezgi

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Hello everyone,

 

I'm a designer and developper working on a new manga reading website with some additional features. I'm wondering about how law works about this. I know scanlations are illegal but from what I've read on the web it's quite hazy on how law works for translations.

 

I won't be hosting any manga and won't be charging anything (no ads either), I mainly want to make some nice website for finding and reading mangas. Am I at risk by doing this ? What can happen if my website is spotted by authorities ?

 

Thank you for reading.



#2
Natureboy

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I'm no lawyer, so take this for what it's worth.  A while back MangaUpdates.com got bullied into dropping their clickable links to scanlator websites. Hence even helping people find copyrighted materials entails some exposure under international copyright treaties. They didn't get shut down. They did have to change some things on the site. You might be able to find out what actions were threatened against them, should they not comply. Note that MU is also the most complete multi-publisher source for what manga has been licensed in English, so it's not as if they weren't also promoting the legal retail market for translated manga.



#3
rezgi

rezgi

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Hello, thank you very much for your detailed response. What it shows me is that it's quite tricky to publish manga scans, if even MangaUpdates, that doesn't display scans, have been 'contacted' for their content. I'm not planning to live a thug life :D