Measures for avoiding translations being stolen

I think Ai Chan did something similar, it doesnt
My advice: The best way to win is to lose and lose horribly.
That way you stop caring, the stress and high blood pressure is not worth it.
I have always believed that stopping theft is too expensive, it is best to make more than gets stolen

 

Well the best was is not to put it on NU at all, cuz the thieves are using NU to automate the scraping, if it's not on NU they won't steal it.

 

GM_Rusaku is correct. If we don't want those thieves to stole from us, the best method is to stop putting your translations in NU. So why don't we just not post all our translation work in NU? I mean, I tried doing it and it's kind of funny at first. I did not put a certain chapter on NU and that chapter is after a cliffhanger. With that method, I was able to protect my translation from being stolen and the readers on those aggregator sites will have no choice but to check my site because they won't be able to find it anywhere else. Unfortunately, it seems that the leechers from those aggregator sites are proactive. Since anyone can put translations on NU as long as they have the link, someone else is now putting my translation in NU. It is probably them because I asked the cooperation of my readers.
I wish there is a way for translators to be the only one who can put their works on NU.

 

I put my releases on NU because I'm not translating for myself, I'm translating because I want people to read this.

I won't have anyone reading if it's not on NU.



As for your releases being added? NU releases are added by bots, unless you directly ask Tony to remove your novel from NU, it will keep on being automatically updated.

 

95% of my readers are from NU so I wouldn't dare to ask anyone to remove my translation links here. NU community also supports us translators so it is the best place to put your translations to.

I don't think that its the bot since I was able to skip two chapters of one of my series before someone add those skipped chapters on NU. I was sure that it was someone since he wrote a comment.

What I probably want to ask Tony is a log in for translators so that the translators will be the only one to put their translated works on NU. Since it will affect everyone, I probably won't ask for it.

 

That probably means your category/title aren't clearly worded (happens more often than you might imagine), because the bot would pick it up otherwise.

And as I said before, almost all of NU releases are bot-added, so... Tony would never add something that restricted who can add chapters, it's counterproductive.

 

Nope. I changed my domain name last month. If category/title aren't clearly worded it would at least appear in group news. Latest group news for my group was my announcement that I'll move to a new domain.

Exactly why I didn't even try to request them. It would be troublesome for Tony and everybody else and I'm sure those aggregators will find another way in the future.

It's just a shame that when I finally thought that I finally found a method that works for me, it didn't even take a week for it to lose effectiveness.

 

I offer free WordPress hosting that will let you use plugins in exchange for ad revenue.
It costs $24 for a reason, free stuff is not sustainable.

 

In my case, I never linked my translation on NU. I guess one of my readers did. I don't fault them for doing it, as they probably think they're doing me and the author a favour, but in reality it's not. If you don't want your translation listed, you have to clearly say it at the beginning of every chapter. And if it does get listed, you have to quickly inform the mods either @Tony or @runsing to remove it. Maybe they can even ban your website from being posted? I don't know.

I suppose this would harm NU in a small way, but whether or not a translation site is listed on NU should be the translator's choice. If the translator doesn't want it listed, he should be able to avoid it from being listed.

Alternatively, you can give aggregators trouble by being inconsistent. By inconsistent, I don't mean you vary your delivery dates, I mean being so unpredictable it breaks the scraper's programming. Maybe one release have it appear after clicking the first link, one release the second link, third release an ad.ly link and fourth release after a joke page. Only a scraper that scrapes all content will be able to scrape your content now, but this is better, because now they spend more CPU power and you can now use spider traps to find out their IP and now you can block their IP. Now they can't scrape your content, unless they change their IP, which you will also block, one after another.

 

The scraper bot only scrap the link. I never put link to the wordpresa page and the scraper never went there. They had to manually update them

 

Having played this "dodge the aggregator" game for a while ( and with some success so far ), I can tell you this.

This helps, it is not enough on its own, but its a start.

It is your choice. You can ask the mods to take you off the bot list and not approve your chapters manually, they so far are inclined to agree to this, but cannot guarantee nothing will slip through. Password protecting the chapters ( and having the password somewhere public, like Discord )does give that guarantee, NU doesn't list password protected stuff.

I don't expect this to hurt NU though. NU is by far the biggest source of views for any small/medium translation site. No team even remotely concerned with views or add money will ever voluntarily give it up. It might very well change it from a directory of fan translations to index of semi-commercial/commercial translations though. Dunno if Tony wants that for his site long-term.

This is good, especially if you sprinkle in a bunch of links a normal human won't see, or would be unlikely to click. BUT. You also have to disable your subscription feeds. All of them. All scrapers latch to your feed, because that's an easy way to monitor the site for updates.

The goal of the exercise is making easy automation non-viable. A determined human will always break your protection, but employing a human to watch out for your novel and copy it by hand is expensive. The ad revenue will never pay that back for most of the novels out there, maybe with the exception of biggest Wuxiaworld/Qindian properties.

Yup. Set up honeypots. Block IPs that visit them. Preemptively block all known TOR exit nodes. Fingerprint your releases so that when they are copied, you'll find out when and from what IP, and block that IP too. It is tedious work, but it pays off long-term.

 

Funny thing is, the manga scanlation site already tried this, and unless you make the watermark sigificant enough to actually disturb the reader, automated tools from sites would easily remove them. There also way too many image to text tools available out there. Sure it stops most automated sites, but if someone wants to steal your stuff, sadly there aren't a lot you can do about it. One of the reason so many scanlation groups died in the last couple of year is because of the aggregation sites simply taking away too many of our readers and we couldn't afford even our server costs.

You know the best way for them not to steal it would be to never publish it in the first place right? Your actions are exactly like some of the manga scanlation groups when aggregators first popped up, which ended up hurting themselves more than the aggregators. Sounds to me that you're going through more work protecting your translations than actually translating. Oh, and making your actual readers go through hell to read your stuff. These measures often push readers toward aggregator sites where they don't have to go through your convoluted steps.

 

I disagree with this being a reason for scanlating groups dying.

There are just way too many ways of scanlating without a site, some uploaded their chapters to batoto (or mangadex now), some upload on another bigger group's site, some just make imgur albums, and I have even seen one uploading directly on aggregators.

Aggregators kill scanlating groups because they destroy motivation, not because they steal ad revenue.

 

I sure do. That tends to be pretty fool-proof and pretty terminal for the project.

I guess. Not that anybody, you included, has any better solution, though. And please, no platitudes about piracy being a "service problem". Even when there is no protection and NU exists to act as a storefront, the aggregators blossom.

There is no way for a single translation group to ever outcompete an aggregator, it would need at least as much content as the aggregator has and an legal team to handle takedown requests to stay on top of search results. You would need an effective, legal monopoly, some sort of Steam equivalent to deal with distributing all the translations of existence. And even then, it wouldn't work. NU is here, and it's nearly that. Steam exists and game piracy is still a thing. Crunchyroll didn't solve the problems of anime.

There is no better solution.

I can do nothing and keep toiling in obscurity for a thief with a scraping script watching as he grows rich on my work without having to expend an iota of effort. While I get no traffic. And have to pay server costs.
I can try to make his scraping attempts unprofitable.
Or I can quit. Quitting would bring me the most benefits in fact. Would you like me to quit?

More work? Marginally. Hell for readers? Not really, they just have to pick a link to open where they used to have the chapter served to them directly before. Oh, they have to remember to check the site once a week too. Much oppression I guess. But since the author of the novel I work on asked that we try to protect his IP, I will continue to inflict these horrible measures on the world in order try to protect his IP. They work so far.

Still, you are right in a way. There is a number of people ( may they get fucked in the ass with a cactus ) for whom that would be excuse enough to go pirate. Very selfish times those.

 

Generally speaking, I think it is not worth the effort to try and combat the pirates. It's better to just leave them be.

However, since the author directly asked you to protect his IP, I think you're totally right in doing your best to troll aggregators! Work hard! >.<

 

I don't need to troll None of the chapters I released this year have been copied by the usual suspects so far. Hopefully, things will continue in this way.

 

Seriously, how hard is it to make 2-3 dummy pages for every release? it's just copy paste. It doesn't hurt you, the creator, and it doesn't hurt the reader, unless every click shoves pop up ad at their faces. Nobody is going through hell to read the stuff, it's just an additional click. While I do agree that some leechers are so bone idle that they freeze when they have to click another link, there's really nothing you can do about it. Lazy, entitled kids are everywhere.

As for creating spider traps, that doesn't harm anyone. Readers won't even see it. If you don't know what spider trap is, I can explain, but it's probably better just to google it. It's effective everywhere. Once you have it set up, you can catch every automated scrapers, even google's. Yes, google also use scraper, that's how their search engine works.

The above measures do not remove the possibility of your work being stolen. What it does is incapacitate automated scrapers. Since most of contents are stolen via automated scrapers, removing their scrapers' ability to function and giving their scrapers a bloody nose through spider traps makes your site troublesome for them. They will still copy your site if they really want your stuff, but it gets progressively more annoying because they have to do this by hand every single time. They want easy money, they really don't want to work that much.

 

While motivation has been a probably the biggest part (also plummeting recruitment as people lose interest in manga, so we had a really hard time finding translators and redrawers), a lot of the larger irc based groups are dying out now. Back in 2010-2012, we would easily get $300-$500 a month in donations which was enough for us to buy server space at a private company that wouldn't just take down our stuff from a single DMCA and support enough bandwidth for people to get their manga. By 2015, donations have dropped to almost nothing ($40 a month) and traffic was also down a significant amount, mostly because people no longer visit scanlation sites anymore. We also noticed the same drop in irc downloads as well. I remember seeing Japanzai shut down, and with batoto gone, it feels like the end of an era. Well at least village idiot and S2scans are still around, albeit with a skeleton crew compared to when I was working with them.

 

Well, Batoto hasn't been around for that long anyway. *shrugs*

I can imagine that these donations helped keep the site running, but there is no need for a site at all. If anyone stopped scanlating because of being unable to have a site for themselves, then they are just lying to themselves... Which is well, okay I guess?

Loss of motivation matters a lot more than a site though.

 

Raws aren't always free either, especially raws of the quality we needed. You probably won't understand unless you actually do cleaning/redrawing, as normal readers don't appreciate how much effort and money is needed for a good scanlation. Clearning and redrawing low res raws is a nightmare, and the quality you get is shit. So no, we can't just scanlate without any resources at all. Unlike novels which only relate to text and can be easily copy pasted.