“He also stole from Deviantart artist, what can he say about that??
Besides in his blog Nick said once: “if you steal my work, you’re going to pay with money” That should also aply to him!! He’s just a liar, he has no excuses for stealing, and nobody should even try to excuse him either.”

Okay, so the person was not actually a deviant but the point is he did steal from essentially a nobody.

Because Nick makes money off of seriously copyright infringement which he made no disclaimer about before this came up. Many if not most pay the ridiculously high priced books in the stores despite the not so great translations that sort of ruin the magic of manga and read online. Moreover, honestly, how much does translation groups make? They are constantly dropping series and also that, they make a big disclaimer about it (obviously) not being their own which our special Nick does not do. Your statement about everybody who reads manga does it is false. I have plenty of friends who do not read scanlations at all.

Basic economic principle, people!!

[...] talking about the relationship between the two issues, especially when some folks noticed that Simmons was copying from volumes that haven’t been published in the U.S. yet. In the wake of that controversy, Melinda Beasi confessed her own sordid past as a reader of [...]

And the scanlations being better sometimes is a lot better. The official translations have a way of dulling the classic shipping moments.

[...] the last month or so, spinning out of the Nick Simmons plagiarism mess, various smart people online have been bemoaning scanlation sites like One Manga and MangaFox. [...]

true, most characters in anime/manga are similar to one another. However, there is an additional personality trait that differentiates the characters amongst animes and mangas. Unfortunately, his doesn’t. Therefore, he copied the character build off from Bleach.

I pity the waste-up wanna-be. He claims to be a fan of Bleach yet he fails to understand the line between inspired and copying. He loves Bleach so much that he wants to create something as of equal. Something as moving as Bleach that it blinded him. Absolutely disgusting, pitiful and just, well trash. He’s equivalent to the existence of ticks, he’s the lowest form of life in this universe, his name is not even worth mentioning to the point that he should be refereed to with ‘it’ rather than ‘he/him/his’. I seriously just don’t see the point in its existence, it’s just causing nuisance for everyone else. I feel sorry for it’s parents for ever allowing it to exist. Although, I’m sure it’s very happy for receiving this much negative attention and creating that burning rage within genuine Bleach fans such as myself. It makes me wonder just how is it able to walk outside under broad daylight with such shame, actually how is it even able to wake up everyday and live? truly, puzzling~

[...] Not Steal Manga Jump to Comments There’s been a lot of debate going on lately about plagiarism, piracy and scanlations in the manga world. No doubt you’ve heard of the recent trouble Nick [...]

[...] fans talk about Nick Simmons, son of KISS memberGene Simmons, who copied several manga (mostly Bleach) to make his own comic Incarnate. When caught, Simmons issued a [...]

That is using an ad hominem, using a lesser (and unrelated) wrong to defend one that has obviously crossed the lines.

The first issue of fansubs is passive: When reading and downloading online, neither readers nor fansubbers earn any money, nor are they taking any tangible credit for their work. Even if publishers lose a fraction of the potential pool of consumers, by observing the late releases of the American versions, it’s easy to see the role of fansubbers in establishing and expanding that potential consumer pool to begin with. This was said not to justify fansubbing, but to show that that fact, as well as the lack of moneymaking involved on the fansubbers part, makes it a “lesser” and grayer evil.

However even the positive/negative aspects of fansubbing is not the reason why it’s irrelevant to this issue. It’s the fact that this is about the plagiarism of this single artist, regardless of whether the original work he ripped off was posted online or not. Someone, especially a “professional”, is copying other work and *passing it off as his own intellectual property* and then also *making money off of it*. How is there not a problem here, both moral and monetary?

Whether people read or buy the books at bookstore isn’t a part of the issue here. It’s about someone ripping and copying ANY work and passing it off as entirely his own.

…Would David and Deb be any more critical if it were an *American* artist that got his work ripped, traced, repackaged and then sold for profit?

There’s a much more notable Japanese example in Shonen Jump — in Eyeshield 21, Hiruma nicknames everyone up to and including his love interest “Fucking ” (neatly changed to “Damn ” in Viz’s translation).

Granted, this was the one time I’ve seen it used in this series and I haven’t read enough other shounen series to know what the actual statistics of swear word use is, but Kubo’s use was blatant enough to shock me when I realized what he wrote. And while it shocked me, I’m not so certain if it did the same to the original audience. I don’t necessarily approve of amateur translators throwing curse words left and right as a sign of accuracy, but I thought I’d throw this out there as a thought.

The only way you’d know if the translations are better is if you were fluent in Japanese, and if you were fluent in Japanese you’d know that it is a very nuanced language and thus tricky to translate, so there can be more than one acceptable translation. Even if scanlations do have better translations, that doesn’t forgive the atrocious grammar and sentence structure. And if you were fluent in Japanese you wouldn’t be bothering with reading translations at all.