Illegal Japanese manga site manager arrested in the Philippines

He should have gone before...now he will face 30 years of prison since money is involved.

Copyright law is one of humanities more crazy laws....to be able to own ideas, words and images (beyond your own face) to the point you can stop other people making money using them . Its nuts. Its only gotten nuttier when Disney got the U.S. government to extend copyright protections by several decades in some cases. Mickey Mouse should have been in the public domain ages ago but now its set for 2024...until our corporate master Disney steps in again.

His presence in the country is a risk to public safety and security," and will likely be deported to Japan, Morente said.

What a load of crap!

A couple of weeks agao I was issued with a DMCA or take down letter, from a company in Spain claiming owership of my work.

Thanks for that. I had not even considered how copyright law could oppress even the real owner! Just another reason to get rid of it in my opinion.

Glad to see the govt. used their resources to launch a worldwide manhunt and pressure the Philippine government on such a menace to society that was stealing the money directly from the poor artists directly, why every single time a random person went to the site that was surely a lost sale of a brand new book! I certainly can't possibly think of a better use of public funds and police time, and I definitely agree with their statement that him living in the Philippines is a risk to the country's security and safety!

so you think its alright that I don't own the work I have spent years and hours creating?

Nope. You should have never expected anything beyond 1) being recognized as the creator and 2) making all the money off of it up until someone else took the time to copy it. At which point you have to make your money by competing on other merits...just like so many other industries.

Its like if someone could copyright yellow corn. Yellow corn is not natural. It was the product of someone's hard work in selective breeding. That person surely enjoyed some benefits of that work. But then others got the corn and they did better marketing, planting methods, distribution etc and made more money than him, well welcome to capitalism.

and hopefully to enable them to make something like a decent return on it.

What is the overhead of creating an image on paper with a pencil?

The cost is in the mass production of magazines and/or setting up servers, hiring staff etc. And you should be able to get enough returns/ profit in the first sales of every new story, character whatever and so should the company you work for. You just have to keep everything secret until release.

it might just serve to enlighten you as to what copyright is all about and why it's a perfectly valid concept.

I think you are confusing being told what to think with enlightenment.

@Zichi

This Norman Goodman is a troll and you're being sealioned. Don't feed the trolls.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sea-lioning

You're welcome! Don't waste your time on these jokers - Goodman, Oldman, Gambare, they're all the same guy.

Alfie Noakes People yell "troll" awful fast. My opinions may not be main stream but that does not make me a troll.

You want to see some trolling? Here it is: "His presence in the country is a risk to public safety and security," that is some righteous trolling right there....fear mongering over copyright violations. Puh-leeze.

As for my opinion on this subject it comes from analyzing concepts of ownership, including how one can be said to own land, how far that ownership goes, and how the state actually owns it over you. But its a lot easier to explain concepts of ownership of physical property than it is an idea. One reason being the list of items to take note of are quite a bit longer with intangible property rights.

We have not even yet gotten into the impracticability of trying to enforce copyright laws internationally, how technology has changed the game for everyone with a photocopier or printer, and what sort of over-reaching anti-freedom laws its going to take to make the system function to the satisfaction of the small-timers. Plus it seems to me that copyright advocates are a lot less interested in having a system that allows content creators to make a living and far more interested in twisting it into something they can leverage to get rich without doing any real work.

Even remove my name and put their name instead, claiming to be the original author.

Earlier I clearly wrote: "You should have never expected anything beyond 1) being recognized as the creator "

Look. If you want to make accusations about stuff I never talked about fine. But don't accuse me of stuff I clearly already took a stance against.

You clearly have personal emotional investments talking for you in this discussion. I don't think I can count on you being objective about this. But I will take up your pharmaceutical example. You are talking about company secrets there. For a company to get that drug off the shelf and recreate it is also going to take a lot of time. By the time they do, the original company should have already profited and can then sell the drug for a lower price that will make them competitive with their new rivals. I suggest you study about how the price of insulin tripled in price in an 11 year period due to a formulation update practice called "evergreening" which keeps patents from expiring which prevents generic drugs being created by rival companies. Three companies control the insulin market in America this way and it appears they are colluding. And its all based on the concept that you can own an idea.

Im guessing the next sites, and there will be many more, will be located in China or Russia servers, then what!?

Downvote Norman all you want - he makes very valid points. The copyright/TM system is highly flawed. The concept started as a way to encourage creativity and development - but it has become so overrun with lawyers that it now actually discourages both.

Popular music is a good example. Until very recently, it was common practice for popular musicians to borrow from one another. Now, even a vague similarity can bring a lawsuit, and musicians have to constantly second guess themselves when they compose. It has a chilling effect on creativity.

Criminalizing what was a civil dispute until very recently is just a draconian way of doubling down on an obsolete system.

These issues need to be addressed honestly. And the major entertainment companies are striving to avoid that. The Disney corporation creates almost nothing of value these days. They simply buy what others have created and exploit it into the ground to make massive profits while squashing creative competition.

There has to be a balance

It usually costs more time and money to develop something from scratch, than to copy it

It usually takes a lot of R&D and failures and dead-ends (for every failure ya learn something) before resulting to that one product that works - a copier merely has to copy that one product that works, without having to spend the time and money for all the failures along the way. There should be exclusivity dependent on the amount of investment put into developing that product

But at the same time, exclusivity shouldn't be forever or an inordinate amount of time - that's also abuse

Finding the right balance is the tricky part