Comment by numpad0

It's clearly Japanese amateur content publishing economy that they are after. They're leaving professional comic/porn sections of same websites as-is, while cutting off multiple amateur bookstore chains[1] altogether. This is not even double standards.

Their intent is undoubtedly to throw wrenches into Japanese manga ecosystem that incubate and train authors rather effectively through out-of-economy feedback mechanisms in social media and self publishing, massively supercharged in the past decade through Twitter; it had proved immune to foreign replication attempts, financial incentives, leverages, even generative AI tools[2]. Those tools don't do much, other than raising barrier to entry by raising expectations and bolstering Japanese dominance.

Some crazy person somewhere must be on a cultural crusade trying to "solve" that problem, not understanding that trying to deny financial incentives just widens the cost-performance gap between Japan and the rest of the West by suppressing market valuation of Japanese manga and anime, allowing it to be more heavily subsidized by authors' dayjobs. They never made money in manga. Introducing money to disinterested then refusing it achieves nothing. Otherwise it makes no sense.

1: as in small videogame-shop-like franchises that specialize in casual self-published books - yes, that's a thing in Japan.

2: AI is completely useless in manga, I mean, there's no way copyright flamewar and watermarking movement existed if it worked. Pornographic voice drama authors[3] are loving it for generating cover arts for free. But even they don't look interested in AI content generation, they just love free covers.

3: yes, it's a thing in Japanese language, seem to be steadily growing even among English speakers. They're picking up Japanese fast. The hardest language on Earth, not anymore.