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Copyright liability for websites, question regarding ownership

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whozatnow

Junior Member
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?
 


FlyingRon

Senior Member
Your friend very much has legal culpability. The copying and translation into a derivative work without the authorization of the copyright holder is infringement. He is way wrong about escaping liability because he's ripping off Japanese authors. Japan and the US are both signatories of Berne and WIPO copyright conventions. This effectively extends copyright protection between the countries. He can be sued in the US for infringing on the Japanese copyright.
 

quincy

Senior Member
In addition to what FlyingRon said, it may be important to note that Turkey is also one of the countries that signed the Berne Convention treaty. ;)

Your friend's best course of action, to avoid legal liability, is to obtain written and signed licenses from the copyright holders, transferring to him the rights to translate into English (make derivative copies of) the Japanese manga.

If, as you say, the manga industry has "historically always been friendly with scanlators," there is no reason to think that your friend's request for a license will be denied.

Good luck.
 
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