this has annoyed me for years on translation sites. a company license a story then just sits on it?!? they take down all the fan translation then take down the author LN/WN. so you would think its cause they plan to sale the story at bookstores or a anime perhaps. BUT NOOOOO they decide to do NOTHING there sole reason for buying the copyright seems to be to destroy the story....WHY?? copyright is expensive right?
They sit on it to increase future returns. It's the a strategy in the same category as "limited time only" strategies in the fast food business. The idea is if the material is inaccessible for a lengthy amount of time then when they put it back up you'll cause a serious spike in interest in both returning readers and new readers. Edit: there is also a chance the company that bought the license is owned by the original publisher at which point they sell the license for cheap and it's only to maintain a legal right to the material in other languages and formats. This practice is basically illegal but hard to prove if they use a third party who while not owned by them is willing to buy the license and just hold it. It is nominally a way to cut out the piracy on novels in foreign languages even if they have no plans for publishing in another language.
Both your posts are ignorant. The Japanese publishers license per volume and would charge an arm and a leg for subsequent volumes. Like they did to ADV, they(the Japanese novel company which are usually conglomerates so they have a loan division) can offer you loans to license with exorbitant prices for content and then bankrupt you lol https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.D._Vision
not just a single language it is spread out. just seems a costly venture that has no return or likely profit and the licensing web troll are always working on taking content down.
Haha it doesn't help that the leaders of this companies are in their 70s and don't understand that free licensing is a boom boon. Sharing profits is better than asking for exorbitant upfront costs.
i have thought on this a lot if these jerks were 1) trying to push a different novel i could understand. example: suzam vs superman there was a lot of money placed on that license war: reason profit 2) the author was trying to protect his work/ mass take downs are rarely got anything to do with the writers. 3) protecting the arts example the mass bootlegging of anime comes to mind /im guilty of this i watch a lot of anime and never buy anything
Things get stuck in development hell but lets know about two things Japanese media companies do not care about English audiences. Rakuten bought viki.com but usually Japanese TV dramas do not have subtitles Things get stuck in development hell, sometimes there is the intention but it fails because higher ups do not approve or the previous volume didnt match up in sales
Licensing isnt as bad as it used to be. Granted, it still could be better but things have advanced for the better, somewhat. Can you provide any recent example of license sitting? The only one that comes to mind was the license for Hidan no Aria, years ago, where the eng license holder released 2 volumes then didnt bother releasing anymore. +1. It's all about the money they can get in japan and they dont care about anywhere else which, in a global world, is a stupid business move. Personally, i think the only way they'll really be open to global markets is if the domestic JP market becomes unable to maintain itself.
I didn't realize he was only referencing JP novels. As for their bad business practices in extremely exploitive loans it makes me think 2 wasn't enough...
I would like to know exactly what cases are you thinking about, because there is a lot of misinformation about that kind of things. The only instances that I know of where a group ceased the translation (and removed what they had done) due to a DMCA C&D notice where the series was not published in english after a short time (often a couple of months) are notices that come on behalf of the japanese publisher, not of any english-language publisher (well, a couple of them could be a mixup with the related manga/anime, and I have a hunch that some come from wholly unrelated people). I have yet to come across a notice on behalf of an english-language publisher that didn't go through with the sale of the books.
Yen Press is a Kadokawa subsidiary. Unless specifically mentioned, they have the licensing rights for English releases by default. They don't have to apply for a translation license. Other companies need to apply to Kadokawa to take the license off Yen Press. Kadokawa prefers to let only their subsidiaries release translations of their work. They bought the Malaysian-based Gempak Starz (now called Kadokawa Gempak Starz) for that same reason. Now the young adults novels scene in Malaysia is dominated by Japanese light novels, in Malay language. Because Gempak Starz work very fast as they also have their own manga magazine called Gempak where original Malaysian mangas are published. Gempak Starz also has the licensing rights for the Malay versions of some Korean manhwas.
While I can remember a handful of novels that weren't completely translated to English, I haven't heard of this happening in recent years? Yen Press for example is really reliable in delivering the stuff they license... Differently from Tokyopop that never finished Karin and the other company whose name I forgot that licensed Hidan no Aria and only released a few volumes... >.> So... I can understand the annoyance, but I don't see this kind of thing happening anymore?
The reason for that is because the license holder is the Japanese publisher, not the English publisher. The English publisher is merely borrowing the rights to publish the translated work.
Where was it mentioned in that page that ADV went out of business because of exploitative loans? While it did say ADV went out of business, but it also said that ADV was just selling itself to itself, due to a need for a rebranding.
I never said otherwise. I just said that the people ranted about licensers that bought rights to never act upon them, when the only times fan translators have been asked to stop their activities on series that didn't make it to that language were hit by the original right holders, so it's not like they are spending money to "sit on them". I meant that it was misguided anger, since they are accusing licensers of practices they don't follow.