Quote:
Originally Posted by komitsuki
When I was a kid in Seoul, I read a manga series that my friend bought with her money. I didn't pay any money to the manga or something; just borrowing it from my friend with no cost. Does that mean I stole that manga series because I didn't pay the service fee of reading it?
Food for thought.
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It's different in that case though due to the law. It's fine if you borrow manga/books/CDs/DVD's off your friends, the point is that sites like OM deal in ~wholesale distribution~ on a massive scale. This isn't one bloke lending his personal collection out to everyone he knows in person, it's a ring of people copying copyrighted material and producing a public release of the item against the wishes of the publishers and writers. It's exactly the same, and just as illegal as someone filming a movie in a cinema, burning copies and selling it as a bootleg. The fact that OM doesn't charge the reader is negligible, they're still piggybacking a fat profit off of it. Buying books, passing them on, borrowing them and swapping them with friends etc, is a viable and legal way to spread interest that actually genuinely supports the writers, artists and the rest of the people who put massive effort into the production of the work.