Discussion Piracy and FAN Translations are FREE Advertising

Alright, I'm going to be the guy that's going to be dumping the bucket of cold water on the "free advertising" argument and those not familiar with certain aspect of copyright laws. Not sure how many recall, I had a rather long argument on reddit about a year ago with a certain armchair general that thought they knew more than someone that actually dealt with the actual shit *rolleyes*

There's a two major reasons why DMCA get sent out, one is $$$, the other is legal.

$$$ is easily explain, hardly anyone will pay when it's available for free. On top of material and administrative costs, there's also the licensing costs (that's why translated manga were always more expensive than the original, logistic costs aside - note: it's fuckton cheaper to print in asia). Long story short, nothing beats free, especially easily accessible free. Depending on the contract, this could directly affect the author depending if the contracts involved was lumpsum (one time payment) or royalty (continuous payments with fixed percentage tied to sales).

Legal is a pain in the ass, but the one I'm more familiar with is the enforcement of ownership. The court has to see that a company was ACTIVE and PERSISTENT in protecting their property, otherwise, it would be more biased against them. DMCA is one of the tools to do just that (it used to be Cease and Desist), many people are really not familiar with how DMCA works, but relevant to our specific niche, it restricts public access (this include a fee to access it, since that's just a payment for access, not the access itself). What this means is that private translations are allowed, as are critiques (there was a case where an entire work was quoted, translated and dissected, and couldn't be taken off the market).
So the original translator(s) still own the translation for private use, this is also why publishers are reluctant to use fan translation even when they are superior, there would be another layer of rights to be involved in the contract signing, and from a business POV, I'd rather have my own translation hire do it since the rights of will be contractually given to the company. Also, be aware that if someone file a DMCA to you, you've the right to respond. Especially if it's a false DMCA, which is a felony (perjury), so they can get into serious shit with it, hence companies don't do it willynilly - as in, they don't send DMCA before they acquired the rights.

The "free advertising" period is the authors looking the other way, or allowing someone else to their work, but not enforcing their rights for the time being, this does NOT mean that the author(s) transferred their rights to the non-publisher translator (there were few rare cases of that). Once it reach a certain threshold, this no longer applies. Case in point would be a foreign publisher picking up the works, they assess the viability of a work and then gets the right to it. For those that claim that "free advertising" would increase sales, I can tell you, they don't, not in this niche. Publisher fucking shit up aside (ie. tokyopop), long tail sales isn't a viable model for our niche. Sales are especially front-heavy in the majority of cases, so each subsequent translation of volume means a decrease in sales. If you are not making profit (breaking even is never good, just not as bad as going in the red), as a publisher, that's a bad sign. The misnamed "free advertising" in this case isn't free, it's being paid with the bottom line. It's a different if it's used as a loss-lead, with other merchandises picking up the slack, but when was the last time you heard a non-native publisher releasing any merchandises?