Hi all! I am thinking of starting a translation for a Korean novel. However, I noticed a lot of sites actually copy from the original translator. Is there a way to combat this? If I got permission from the original author and own the copyrights would I be able to punish them in some way? Thanks
No one can escape piracy in the internet, even Qidian had their stories get pirated, the last thing yoh can do is setting up a password and giving them to your loyal readers though it would make the translation inaccessable to many.
That won't do either, the pirate could just enter inside and steal. Qidian is quite good to introduce Spirit Stones but that didn't do it either, however to due to Spirit Stones their lost is quite less. Excluding the log in and other ways to obtain free Spirit Stones. If you hire a capable programmer he/she can do some trick to have your text not be copied. Although it could still be copied but in a very particular way. Unless they know that text nowadays can be extracted from pictures.
I've seen some translators turn the translation into images. Or put part of the chapter in text, part in pictures, and that makes it so that any bot who grabs text from the page is only getting an incomplete chapter with random chunks missing. I forget which site, but there is one that doesn't let the readers right-click the page, so the text cannot be copied. Or you could even do both, and add watermarks? They could still get around these two methods by taking screenshots, but it will make it harder and probably slow them down. Downside is that makes it alot harder on the reader who is trying to zoom in or out to read. edit: I looked up the 'text extraction from images' thing, and it seems to be pretty easy. There was a simple tutorial on it and everything. I guess the answer is to write it all in code*. (*actually script) The text extraction software won't be able to read it. Your readers will get to learn a neat looking new script~ Fun for everyone~ Here, I recommend this website to find a nice script: www.omniglot.com/conscripts/english.htm Here is a nice example~ (Don't actually do it, readers will cry tears of blood) (You know, this thread makes me think that someone out there trying to avoid internet piracy is going to invent the next new big thing in codes)
Or you can make the most out of it. Like multiple pages for a single chapter. Either way, they can still pirate it.
If you got permission from the author you could dmca takedown the copied novels. I think though the actual site owner will ignore it so probably best to send it to the host site/server. It just seems a pain because there's way too many aggregators who repost translations. I have seen some translators getting around some of them by putting like dummy links and dummy text.. and then either posting the real link or chapter in the comments. Since bots dont copy and paste comments???
The translation community has tried DMCA. We got a certain pirate site removed from google, but it's still the most popular one out there, so... Aggregators tend to live in countries where copyright laws aren't as pronounced, so it's quite hard to get at them. Learn to deal. Honestly, you'll be getting like 10x more views than all of the pirate sites combined, so it isn't too much of a problem.