Background: A friend of mine created a free online manga scanlation website.
Manga is japanese comic books.
Scanlating is where people take manga, scan the pages, translate the pages into another language (primarily English), and replace the Japanese text with the translated text, so that people who don't speak Japanese can still read the comics.
The website takes these scanlations and allows users to view them.
There are a number of issues here, just on the face of it, as to whether or not this is actually copyright violation. For one thing, manga are *generally* not licensed in the United States, so if any copyright law is being broken, it is generally Japanese copyright law, which my friend doesn't care about since he lives in the United States.
There's also the fact that the manga industry has historically always been friendly with scanlators, as the target audience for scanlations wouldn't purchase their products anyways, because they can't read Japanese.
Some people have also mentioned fair use or something, but that doesn't seem to hold water.
Anyways, assuming that despite the previous caveats, the website could still cause legal trouble for my friend, he wants to know whether that legal trouble could be eliminated, were he to pass ownership of the site onto someone who lives in, for example, Turkey. The site owner in Turkey would then pay him 90% of the revenue earned by the site, as a programming and maintenance fee. So in effect the site owner in Turkey would be paying for my friend's web design, coding and administration work. Although clearly that is just in a technical sense, and in all practical senses it would be as if my friend still owns the site and is simply paying 10% of the earnings to someone else in order to avoid the potential legal burden.
If he did this, would my friend still have some legal culpability?
Manga is japanese comic books.
Scanlating is where people take manga, scan the pages, translate the pages into another language (primarily English), and replace the Japanese text with the translated text, so that people who don't speak Japanese can still read the comics.
The website takes these scanlations and allows users to view them.
There are a number of issues here, just on the face of it, as to whether or not this is actually copyright violation. For one thing, manga are *generally* not licensed in the United States, so if any copyright law is being broken, it is generally Japanese copyright law, which my friend doesn't care about since he lives in the United States.
There's also the fact that the manga industry has historically always been friendly with scanlators, as the target audience for scanlations wouldn't purchase their products anyways, because they can't read Japanese.
Some people have also mentioned fair use or something, but that doesn't seem to hold water.
Anyways, assuming that despite the previous caveats, the website could still cause legal trouble for my friend, he wants to know whether that legal trouble could be eliminated, were he to pass ownership of the site onto someone who lives in, for example, Turkey. The site owner in Turkey would then pay him 90% of the revenue earned by the site, as a programming and maintenance fee. So in effect the site owner in Turkey would be paying for my friend's web design, coding and administration work. Although clearly that is just in a technical sense, and in all practical senses it would be as if my friend still owns the site and is simply paying 10% of the earnings to someone else in order to avoid the potential legal burden.
If he did this, would my friend still have some legal culpability?