The Invisible Labor Economy Behind Pirated Japanese Comics

Something that seems to have been overlooked in the article is that in response to ubiquitous piracy and scanlations, Inuysha was released almost simultaneously in English and Japanese. The scanlators decided, the translation wasn't good enough so they released their own anyway. I get it, but the moral argument changed from "I can't buy this in English if I wanted to" to "your product was inferior" which in my opinion is far less defensible.

It also doesn't mention the translations that are done completely crowdsourced on 4chan (usually of pornography.) Someone in Japan will post raw scans of comics they got at Comiket; another anonymous person will offer translations in-thread; another anonymous person will clean up the scans and do the lettering with the new translation and post the updated pages. These translations will often go through multiple iterations of people with varying levels of proficiency in Japanese discussing and correcting the translations, and then finally the finished translated and cleaned up pages will be uploaded to a site somewhere ready for consumption. This is often done completely with no one knowing the identity of anyone else in-thread.

It is an amazing example of the potential of ubiquitous Internet and low-barrier web technology facilitating sharing culture resulting in a final product that would be superior to any commercial offering, if such a product was even offered for sale which it often is not. Even if from a legal (and arguably moral) standpoint it's pretty indefensible it is an amazing thing to watch.