I mean, seriously now.

August 09. 2008, under Blog with 6 Comments

I’m really glad I wasn’t online tonight when the whole fiasco took place.

Hideko filled me in, but I have to say I’m honestly sick and tired of the people who go around crying that we ‘stole the news’ from them.

Okay one. If we were going to steal news, don’t you think we’d be more stealth about it?

Two. Yes. We all dedicate a great chunk of our spare time going around checking all these Japanese artist’s sites and translating from Japanese just to steal from someone else. Does that really make sense?

Three. If people took a look at the site, they’ll notice that we put the credit in the posts. If someone e-mails us in something we say, ‘Thanks to xx’. If we find it on a community, you’ll see it in the source. If we saw it in a community and then went to the OHP to translate it ourselves, you’ll see something like ‘I saw this in the xx community…’.

Four. We want S-T to be a reliable and credible source for news. Since that’s our goal and aspiration, do you really think we’re going to go around stealing from people?

Five. When we know for sure someone has taken from us, we’ll usually call them out. Naturally, we only do this when there’s 100% proof of it. (Like when someone direct links our image, copies and pastes a post with our comments in it or copies and pastes a post, takes out our comments but oddly enough keeps the same typos we had…). Now if we’re going to go around doing this, don’t you think we’d make sure to credit the initial source? Especially when that’s all we ask for?

I don’t go around trolling LiveJournal or various forums to steal from people when I can spend the same amount of time looking through official sites. So yes, maybe someone posts something the same day we do. But when sites are updated, it would make sense that we post about it, as well as other people.

So as a closing note, there are numerous people on this planet who can understand Japanese to some degree. There are numerous people who can access the internet, including band’s official sites. And yes, there are tons of people who rip other people off by not giving them the credit they deserve, but there are also just as many who are happy to credit their sources and I think I can safely say that myself and the rest of the S-T staff are of the latter kind.

I mean honestly, I unjoined some communities on LiveJournal because I knew there were some members who posted in those communities who, if I posted the same thing, would automatically think I stole from them. I don’t want or need that drama and I can find the news on my own, so what’s the point of staying in the community? You know? So I just unjoined.

And before anyone jumps all over me for this, this is not directed to anyone. Just after hearing about what happened, I felt the need to get this out. Every now and then I want to write something like this, but I never do. So it’s nice to finally actually do it.