‘On the state of the community’ – part 1.

Part 1 – About aggregation sites and illegitimate claims of private property over hentai

So, people – let’s start off with the most important part of this essay, which I adequately marked in my flowchart as ‘aggregation sites making money off other people’s work’. I think you can guess what all this will be about.

First, let me clarify what aggregation sites are, for those of you that never heard of that term before. Aggregation sites are websites that aim to offer a condensed library of works of a specific nature, in this case, hentai manga and doujinshi;  ‘having it all in one place’, to keep it short.

Aggregation sites are an excellent way to spread your work if you’re with a translation group. Sites like that often have a reader base running in the upper ten thousands of hits per day, sometimes in the hundred thousands. One example comes to mind where visitor numbers have been a few MILLIONS a day (most likely than not the same few guys hitting F5 all over the place, but whatever). Your work will be read by thousands of people, which results in an increase in your group’s popularity – or so you might think. People never read credits pages anyway…

This all comes at a price though. First thing to note is that several aggregation sites have only been brought to life as a quick money machine; just as in non-H manga online reading sites, most aggregation sites were not intended to spread the love of the works on those sites – it’s about cold, hard cash. Of which translators don’t ever see a single penny, unless the money flows back into commissions (which is something only very few sites do).

The means by which most of the admins earn money are ads (shitloads of them) and paying file hosters. It works like this – the admins upload to several different mirrors, all of which pay per download. It’s not much of a stretch to think that with the massive numbers of hits these sites get, they will make a killing that will far exceed the costs – aka profit. And I can’t ponder it enough, all they do is uploading stuff, without doing any of the ‘actual’ work involved with scanlation. Should we treat that as a ‘compensation for uploading and aggregating hentai works’?

The answer is simply no. While a few of them recycle their revenue by funding commissions to give something back to the community without which they wouldn’t even be able to get any cash in the first place, most of them do not and have only installed their sites for the intention of making money off the work of others. Their ‘work’ is only marginal, to say it nicely. The relation between unpaid volunteer work worth multiple hours and cashing in big time for a few minutes of uploading scanlations is simply flying out the window right there.

One very peculiar case are aggregation sites that outright steal scanlations. Now, while scanlations are free, public goods (albeit derived from illegitimate copyright violations), quite a number of aggregation sites try to turn a profit on keeping the fact that the scanlations they offer are publicly available for free elsewhere. This basically means that they SELL scanlations they do not own (because of the nature of scanlations being a free, public good in all cases, which I am about to prove), although the transfer of property of one owner to the next requires the seller to have private property to the good which he sells. The scanlation groups, like in all other cases of their works being uploaded to aggregation sites, do not get a single buck for their work that is shamelessly being exploited here. The only one benefit aggregation sites offer scanlation groups is also nil – that is, the publicity, because if the ‘customer’ knew that work X was done by group Y, he would not shell out the cash to be ‘allowed’ to look at it.

Another peculiarity are those aggregation sites that sponsor commissions, but do not offer them to the public for free. This is a blatant case of illegitimate private ownership over goods that are supposed to be public (the very nature of pirated goods).
While I am an anarchist communist at heart and despise the very concept of private property at its core, let us, for the sake of the argument, look at a capitalist view at private property, namely that of the great Hans-Herman Hoppe.

Everyone is the proper owner of his own physical body as well as of all places and nature-given goods that he occupies and puts to use by means of his body, provided that no one else has already occupied or used the same places and goods before him. This ownership of “originally appropriated” places and goods by a person implies his right to use and transform these places and goods in any way he sees fit, provided that he does not thereby forcibly change the physical integrity of places and goods originally appropriated by another person. In particular, once a place or good has been first appropriated, in John Locke’s words, by “mixing one’s labor” with it, ownership in such places and goods can be acquired only by means of a voluntary—contractual—transfer of its property title from a previous to a later owner.

The Ethics and Economics of Private Property by H.H. Hoppe

The interesting bits are in bold. Nature-given goods is a nice term. Would you consider pirated goods to be nature-given? Simply there, lying on the ground for you to take up and shape as you see fit, to turn it into a good? While appropriating hentai manga unto yourself by translating them would indeed constitute making them your private property if they were nature-given, this is not the case for pirated ones; for, as Mr Hoppe points out, property can only be transferred by voluntary contract from one owner to another, which is most obviously not the case.

Therefore, even though they have put their own work into it, the goods which they sell are not their private property. They are still free, public goods, albeit illegitimate ones – the pirates (in this case, scanners) could not transfer property unto themselves through the act of piracy and made them a public good (with or without intending to do so – fact is, it is publicly available to no cost) – so, in return, even though you may have infused this good with surplus value (not in the Marxian sense), it is not yours for the reasons stated above.

For these reasons, any aggregation sites (or anyone else, for that matter) trying to exploit the work of others by selling them or trying to sell goods of which he illegitimately appropriated private property are nothing more than a petty thief; a liar and a scammer.

You might wonder, hell yeah, translators and commissioners (that are not working for those trying to keep scanlations to themselves to sell) are also part of the piracy, why not bash them?

The simple reason is that we DO NOT try to illegitimately claim ownership over stolen goods. On the contrary, we infuse these goods with surplus value for English readers (because it is obvious that, for English readers, ENG>>JP, while the good basically remains the same at its core) and return it back into the pool of free, public, albeit illegitimate goods.

What to do?

I recommend scanlation groups to remain vigilant at all times, and to fight all aggregation sites they deem detrimental to the common good. If you have the means to take their illegitimate property and return it to the pool of public goods, by all means, do so.

Stay strong, brothers.