A consortium of Japanese government organizations, manga publishers and anime production and game companies, announced that they have formed the Manga-Anime Guadians Project, a combined effort to crack down on online piracy.
Their first step: unveiling a series of website and video appeals thanking fans for their support and love of the medium but also pointing to sites that offer legal access to read and buy manga. The goal here is to re-direct fans away from pirated content, and encourage them get their manga/anime fix from legal/authorized sources.
The MAG website offers a video thanking overseas fans for their support; there’s Manga-Anime-Here.com with links to buy manga. The website features an assortment of popular manga and anime series with links to read/purchase/download/view them from online and print publishers like Viz Media, Yen Press, Kodansha Comics and Crunchyroll Manga and Chinese language manga sites like AC.QQ.com. Links to anime sites like FUNimation.com and Viz's Neon Alley on Hulu.com are also included, with more sites to be added as the site grows.
Unfortunately the MAG Project's credibility was undercut at its debut by a website that is riddled with problems. At the MAG site PW found wonky navigation and user interfaces, broken search functions, an awkward URL, poor search engine optimization, and cringe-worthy English grammar. ("Keep on stop piracy").
The website and the videos it offers are part of the first wave of PR from the MAG Project to "promote awareness of copyright protection among viewers and consumers, expand the fan base of manga and anime, to eliminate infringing web sites, and to popularize the idea of proper compensation for creative works,” according to the group’s statement. Their next step: serve notice to websites that post and torrent unauthorized fan-translations (a.k.a. "scanlations") of anime and manga series that MAG Project intends to "massively delete" unauthorized copies of 580 anime/manga series owned by over 40 Japanese manga/anime companies from the Internet.
With domestic revenue from manga and anime sales declining, attacking the problem of overseas piracy has taken on greater urgency for Japanese companies. According to the MAG Project, the estimated yearly revenue lost due to piracy is 2 trillion yen, or roughly $19.5 billion dollars. Given that many prime offenders in the scanlation/pirated content space are websites—among them sites such as MangaHere.com and MangaTown.com—that are based in China (a country that seems to have little interest in enforcing copyright law regarding intellectual property, books, comics, movies, anime, and games), it remains to be seen how MAG Project's efforts will play out in the long run.