With the whole furor of manga companies fighting pirates, some scan aggregators have taken it upon themselves to take down titles. MangaFox is one such aggregator who has volunteered to take down over 350 series on their network. Whether those series are fully deleted or not is suspect but the intent is there, though not 100% thoroughly done.
Checking up on the take down notice at MangaFox, it’s actually not MangaFox or the manga companies that have requested to have the series’ pulled from the site but the scanlators who have worked on translating and releasing the chapters to the series. The scanlators are aware of the newly formed coalition and are taking it upon themselves to request manga aggregators like MangaFox to take down their scanlations. Some of the bigger scanlation groups have been known to run into trouble with various manga companies and even so much as to shut down because of them.
Some scanlation sites have mentioned that they will be staying low until this whole affair blows over while others are continuing as usual. One thing for sure, I have noticed a decline in updates of new fan-translated chapters on site aggregators. The lack of known releases on manga aggregators does not really mean much though. I have noticed that some scanlators specifically said they will be taking the released chapters to the “underground” world of IRC or Internet Relay Chat, a place that folks can chat and share files in a P2P-like environment.
What I’m sort of surprised of is the lack of news as to what the Manga Coalition has been doing. Mayhap they are building their case against offending sites and people or maybe they’re just waiting to see who’s left standing after the dust settles since their formation announcement before they act.
I guess there’s nothing to do but to grab some popcorn, hold your breath, and wait for the fireworks.
