You’ll be fine, you won’t be fined.

In light of all the news and problems with downloading free music, you may be asking, do I want to take the risk to read manga online if it illegal. After all, these fans are scanning and distributing work–for free–that someone else created.There are legal issues, but interestingly, the manga culture, business and fans, take a whole other view on scanlations and online manga than the record industry does on downloaded music.

Is It Legal?
Copyright is respected internationally, so by the letter of copyright law, scanlation is actually illegal.

However, it is almost never prosecuted, probably for three basic reasons.

Scanlation is mostly made for fans, by fans. It is viewed by many fans as an acceptable way to read manga which will probably not have any official translation published into another language. In other words, scanlation is made availablefor those who don’t speak the native language of the intended program, or who don’t live in the area it is broadcasted to at least have access to it.The large licensing companies use the response to various scanlations as a factor in deciding which manga to buy licenses to translate. Call if free market research. Scanlation is usually not sold for profit. Some sites do charge monthly fees or ask for donations to maintain the Web site or to provide premium users with more bandwidth (for more downloads).And most stop distributing scanlations for manga that have been licensed, advising fans of the manga in question to buy the official translation.So the call is yours to make. My take: you can support the industry by both:

1) encouraging the growth of manga by reading new manga online and

2) buying print copies of your favorites manga titles as well, especially when you do find something new and cool online.