pandaranda

From my perspective, I believe there are two groups of people that hate (insert online reader name here). Because of 1. they hugely profit or 2. they have no respect.

In respect to the profit argument, the scale matters. If a reader makes well over a million dollars (and they do), they have enough money to license it, but they won't. They'll just cash it all. A scanlator differs in the sense that getting recognized by the publisher/author and becoming part of the official comic is actually like a dream come true (has happened). However, this is not possible for them. So, there is a different goal of will at play. But for the most part, I personally believe that a reader provides service and they're getting paid for the service. If you look at imageshack for example, which is simply image hosting place, they profit by providing a service on delivering images made by other people (and therefore naturally copyrighted by others). But we never say (from our perspective) these are immoral in anyway nor do we say they should not profit from another's copyrighted work because they profit from service, not the work itself (for more details on the difference of the two, check out unix's philosophies on the subject which inspired many further licenses regimes). This topic has, however, made the "war" much more heated as people tend to be sensitive about money. But this increase in sensitivity does not necessarily help spread the knowledge because as you pointed out, does not reach far because it is not the point.

The respect argument is much greater and the true core of these arguments however -- which TG points out. There are many sub points which show the importance of respect in scanlation.

Taking an analogy to the far extreme, even among mafia and pirates (the ones that go "Arrr" and sail the seven seas) there is a notion of respect. Because it's vital to sustainability. Imagine all the pirates going around looting from and killing each other, I'm sure there won't be any pirates left then and they're all dead. It's just beneficial to be respectful. By choosing to respect others, you increase their sustainability and your own. Many of the aggregates however fails to do this. While it's not obviously visible from the outside, scanlation is whithering. No matter which scanlation group you talk to, you'll find all of them saying it's harder to find recruits these days. Evidently, just 2 years back, we saw with Naruto, the most scanlated manga of all time, to have, at any given time, a dozen groups scanlating it. Right now, there's only one -- MangaStream. And that is the source of why scanlators began imposing restrictions like delays or no-rehosting so that traffic can be driven back and hopefully, someone will join. Of course, it may also largely be about profiting (MS probably is), but that goes back to the above argument. As more and more of the masses migrate to the readers while alienating the scanlator breaks the sustainability. And when a reader chooses to ignore these policies, less and less people will find the need or will to go back and talk to them. This prevents the sustainability and thus we've arrived at a point where scanlators have hardest time recruiting when there are more readers than ever.

But beyond respect of delay, there is even a greater respect that's necessary. Respect of attribution -- the notion of letting people know who did this. Without attribution, delays doesn't even matter, no one knows who did it, or rather, it's easy to trick to making people to think someone else did it. You see, aggregates benefit when a reader is under the delusion that the comics are produced there and no where else because the reader will stay and won't search elsewhere. When these delusions were proving to be not rare but common, lot of scanlators became quite furious. But this was not the fault of the scanlator's lack of ability to put their names but that their names were taken off by someone else and/or that they were lead or hinted to believe it was produced there. There are many types, but for one example of misleading, about all the aggregates' advertisement (of those who actually do advertise) always say "get comic x here first!" How can they be the first one unless they made it? (Ironically, we can say this because we are the official reader for many groups.) Clearly the first one was the scanlator. So, these type of hints tend to brainwash people that the source of comics are the aggregates and not the scanlator or that aggregates are the scanlators. There are also more obvious tactics like just removing the credits page and not mentioning the scanlators. One that was infamous about removal of attribution is MangaHere (owned by Noez). Followingly, the revelation mangahere and mangafox, whom often pretended to follow scanlator wishes and thus had become favorable by many, was actually a single identity was the point when pretty much "all hell broke loose" versus Noez and their ethics in business. I'm sure you can imagine the feeling of betrayal they had at that moment. When it comes to attribution for scanlators, scanlators actually hold a completely reversal of the role. How often have you seen a scanlator say, go buy this if you love it? Heck, how often have you seen a game, movie, music, etc pirating group (ones that upload/download) say "buy it if you love it"? All the time! Scanlators don't try to harm their source. Therein lies a big difference.

The main issue has always been about respect and who is loved and who is hated is really a difference of where their moralities lie.

There are also many other less common arguments like reduction of quality, and blah blah blah... But that's really not part of this topic.