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Fan translators asking for payment for latest chapters for comics, webtoons, manhwa, manga...
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
There is a trend currently were fan translaters are paywalling the latest chapters, with poor translations. What are your thoughts on this? I don't mind asking for donations, but asking for money with mediocre translation is scammy.
Examples: https://asuracomic.net/ https://madarascans.com/ https://nightsup.net/ https://casacomic.com/
Rightsholders have to compete with pirates, but the inverse is true too.
Pirates typically win on price, but if they deliver a sub-par product, or make it more inconvenient to access, then it makes sense to go through official channels instead.
Yeah, history has repeatedly proven that piracy is largely a convenience/cost calculation. Each individual person will have a different way that they measure convenience or cost, but that’s ultimately what it boils down to. And piracy’s biggest benefit is that the financial side of the “cost” equation is low.
Maybe the cost has other factors that people consider, like time spent searching for decent sources, malware risk, potential legal issues, moral objections, etc… All of that gets lumped into the cost side of the equation, and weighted based on the individual’s unique situation. For someone like a 12 year old kid with no financial freedom, the “price” side of the cost calculation will be weighted very heavily.
Meanwhile, the convenience has its own factors too. Download speed, ease of access, quality of the media being consumed, etc… All of these factors get weighted and lumped into the “convenience” side of the equation.
It ultimately just boils down to “does the convenience outweigh the cost?” And if piracy becomes less convenient/more costly, (or legit sources become more convenient/less costly) then people will reconsider their decision.