Thirty-six Japanese publishers (joined together as the Japanese Digital Comic Association) and U.S. manga publishers, including Yen Press, TokyoPop, Vertical Inc., and the Tuttle-Mori Agency have announced the formation of “a coalition of Japanese and U.S. publishers announced as a coordinated effort to combat a rampant and growing problem of internet piracy plaguing the manga industry.”

Squarely in the coalition’s sights are the numerous scanlation aggregation websites that host unauthorized, fan-translated and scanned pages from Japanese manga and Korean manhwa.  Many of these sites host thousands of pages of manga without the permission of the manga creators or publishers, and several have garnered enough webtraffic to rank in the top 1,000 of websites in the world. While many fans have come to rely on these sites for a free manga fix, the growing popularity of these sites on top of the declining sales of manga in recent years, in both Japan and the U.S. has made scanlation websites a sore spot for many publishers.

“Scanlation,” refers to the unauthorized digital scanning and translation of manga material that is subsequently posted to the Internet without the consent of copyright holders or their licensees.

Until recently, individual publishers have had limited success getting their licensed titles removed from these websites.

See: About.com