An Abundance of Caution

 

In my email yesterday morning, I saw what was probably the most dreadful subject line I could've ever seen: "Blogger blog takedown notification"

Given what unforunately happened to MartyMcFlies's own LonelyChaser Fansubs page, I anticipated the worst. However, it seems I ended up pretty lucky; it turns out the only damage is that my post about my translation of Wallaby was reverted back to a draft.

Google very unhelpfully does not put the takedown information in the email they send you, but they at least link to Lumen Database which you can use to search up the details of these takedowns. And after seraching for my site, sure enough, it seems my site was targeted in 3 seperate DMCA requests, one for each of my scanlations. Bleh.

Luckily it seems Google only responded to one of them, and they did so by reverting it to a draft rather deleting my entire blog overnight, which I do appreciate them for. All three of these requests come from a certain known DMCA copyright troll, with two of them requested on behalf of Naver WEBTOON and one from Viz Media.

Of course, this whole situation is a little silly, as neither of those companies own any of the rights to the material I translated. But this is just a fact of life with the modern internet; it seems this copyright troll uses a lot of automated systems to fill out their requests with URLs, and it appears that this system is rife with false-positives.

The good news is that it seems the thing that mainly triggered these DMCA attacks on my blog was the inclusion of a direct link to a certain online manga reader, M●ngaD●x. Now this particular site has been in the news recently because they themselves were under DMCA attack from the same group of nefarious copyright trolls... and I could go on a whole rant about how dumb the staff of M●ngaD●x is for thinking it's a good idea to host a blatant piracy site under US jurisdiction. (Like seriously, with the kind of thing you're doing, why did you set it up so you can even fall victim to a DMCA!?)

But anyway, out of an abundance of caution, I have decided to remove any direct links to M●ngaD●x, along with any torrenting sites such as Ny●a. The Mega links will remain for the time being, but we will see if they end up causing any problems in the future. I'd like this blog to be my own, personally controlled platform for my announcements and for posting general information, so if push comes to shove I'll begrudgingly remove any direct links to the translations I produce if it means letting the blog posts stay online.

Please note that I am still posting my work to these sites. My work is always tagged under MrManager, and I will continue to upload my releases to these sites. You will just need to search for them yourself from now on. If there is a site you know of that is willing to host my work, you have my permssion to post it there yourself. (If I haven't already :P)

As always I will publish any updates to this blog as long as it remains standing. In the event it goes down, you can check out the links to my other accounts here! (Yes I did eventually make a Bluesky account.)

As for future project news: I am sooooo close to finishing my next project, so keep an eye out for when that gets posted! (Hopefully when all this DMCA drama simmers down...)

 

 

See you next time!