And One Goes Down

Today online otakudom has been buzzing with the news: top Google ranked online manga piracy reading site One manga, with its sister site, 1000manga, are biting the dust. The official post reads:

“It pains me to announce that this is the last week of manga reading on One Manga (!!). Manga publishers have recently changed their stance on manga scanlations and made it clear that they no longer approve of it. We have decided to abide by their wishes, and remove all manga content (regardless of licensing status) from the site. The removal of content will happen gradually (so you can at least finish some of the outstanding reading you have), but we expect all content to be gone by early next week (RIP OM July ’10).

So what next? We’re not really sure at this point, but we have some ideas we would like to try out. Until then, the One Manga forums will remain active and we encourage all of you to continue using them. OMF has developed into a great community and it would be a shame to see that disappear.

Regardless of whether you stay with us or not, on behalf of the One Manga team, I would like to thank you all for your unwavering support over the years. Through the ups and downs you have stuck with us, and that is what kept us going.

As a certain Porky was fond of saying… That’s all folks!

Time for me to go lay down and let this all sink in.

- Zabi

And for some of you who were wondering, yes, 1000Manga will have its manga removed as well.

Also like to slip in my own thanks to all of you people here too for all the overwhelming support you have given us. We honestly never thought we’d get this far when the site opened up. But hopefully we’ll be able to figure something out for the site’s future so this may not goodbye just yet.

“EDIT
TO ADD:
The forums will remain open and active, nothing is going to immediately change here. There is a suggestions thread here for folks to offer ideas about what OneManga.com should do with the front page, but for the forums it’s going to be business as usual.
“

This comes after mounting legal pressure from manga publishers and fans who wished to see an end to the rampant piracy facilitated by aggregator sites such as this, which generate profit by means of ad revenue, yet pay nothing to the creators of their stolen content.

Amusingly, one of the busiest forums talking about the demise happens to be OneManga’s rival, MangaFox, which is still carrying on business as usual, and indeed, has been happily uploading even more stolen manga, including those they previously locked, all day long. AnimeA is also slow to react, still taking the stance, “We don’t have licensed manga, oh wait, we are taking it down still,” but no further titles seem to have come for a couple of weeks at least. With Mangatoshokan having previously announcing its withdrawal due to the mounting pressure, it seems like the manga coalition’s efforts are deadly serious. This begs the question whether or not MangaFox and AnimeA are going to buckle, or wait for a knock on the door.

UPDATE: MangaFox suddenly took down the Viz titles they had placed back up. No statement has been made regarding this decision, but it is safe to assume it is related to the legal issues and OneManga’s demise.