You can read the first entry about this here.

Google deleted the thread asking them to contact me for more information. Admittedly, it had turned into a shitstorm of abuse. They have not contacted me, despite the fact that several Google employees have been active in that forum over the period that it was posted.

So, I take this to be a sign that we should accept that our block is not going to be overturned, nor are they willing to communicate why.

So be it, that’s their right. They’re a company, and can do whatever they feel is best for them. I find it to be a slightly impolite way to treat someone, but whatever.

As for where we go from here, I think fighting this in a traditional sense is going to be futile. I don’t even know who or what we’re up against. WordPress seems to have declared support for us in that they haven’t deleted us yet. They’ve surely received a load of complaints over the last few days, but we’re still here. For that I thank them, and urge you to support them if you can.

You can read the full story from its source. There’s even a neat quote from Charlton Heston about civil disobedience. And again, link page is safe, but the rest is mostly not safe for work or school.

Google has also reported them to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, even though the site contains none that relates to them. The poster of this announcement lives in Japan and is fairly safe from legal actions, but those who work with him are not. They’re brave enough to continue from this loss and they’ll surely do fine with how wide spread their torrents and fans are. I may not be a fan of lolicon of any sort, but I wish them the best of luck and I’m heavily considering dropping anything Google related. Microsoft’s Bing search engine isn’t too bad, I can easily switch back to Safari from Google Chrome, and I have already found myself using Nico Nico Douga more than Youtube. Such content is purely subjective.

Manga news and information site for scanlations and summaries has had their Google Adsense account disabled without being given a specific reason.

In case you haven’t noticed recently, we’ve removed all of the ads supporting this site. We recently received an email from Google stating our account was disabled. Upon appeal, we were rejected. No particular reason was provided, so we are quite surprised as we have funded the site using Adsense for the past 5 years with no issues. If anything, I suppose I feel quite liberated. It was quite daunting living in the environment of fear Google has created with their Publisher system.

As far as funding issues go, we’re not sure where we stand at the moment. Over the next few weeks, I will be experimenting with different ad networks. We’re not in the red yet, but this is something we will try to work out over the next few months. If we cannot find a suitable replacement, we will be forced to ask for donations as it comes time to pay our server bills. I had hoped it would never come to this, but we cannot control everything. I have enjoyed the free ride that Adsense has given us over the years, and only hope that any new network we join is not more intrusive to your experience than Adsense was.

The full announcement can be found here. Interesting timing soon after the lolicon situation with another site no longer showing on Google’s search engine, perhaps. Surely there’ll be an update to how they’re going to manage the costs of such a will visited site. They may see the site’s content as copyright infringement and Google Adsense does not allow linking or hosting of pornography, regardless if it’s legal or in this case hentai.

Even though the American constitution doesn’t protect obscene media as its goal, it does and will alway will because of subjectivity.

As selective enforcement grows, more and more normal well meaning people will be guilty of crimes that they may or may not know exist. That’s not to say one should be anti-government as government is only as good as the people who put leaders in power.

Manga is fiction, media, and art. If sexual material is deemed obscene then so should violence. So if one makes a murder crime movie, the buyers of the movie should be charged with the crimes relating to movie or the thoughts and planning of committing such a crime. Extreme example, but relevant.

One may say to themselves that they would have fought these charges to the bitter end, but then you may realize that you’re about to lose everything and that this effects your friends and family.

I believe anyone put into such a situation should not give in. Try to be respectful, but surely give them hell when someone says or implies something outrageous. Punishment of normally lawful citizens should not be accepted with this. Good intentions of people involved with this case is debatable. On one hand it’s just simply not knowing, but it soon become ignorance after a point in time.

Background:
Christopher Handley is a fairly long time manga fan who served the US Navy, managed to gather a collection of well over a thousand such books, a comfortable career in computers, and is in good will with his family. The guy also plays games online, but apparently that is not socially acceptable in the state of Iowa even in 2010. Before the official sentence, a push to ban the person from computers was made like how some places ban alcoholics from buying liquor. Makes one wonder how often such suggestions are made with actual pedophiles.

Basically his order of manga that he imported was inspected before being picked up and driven home. On the way home he has a face full of cops and serious biz dress up people raiding him. Roughly 80 of his 1200 manga were seen as offensive in the case with many of those being yaoi and lolicon. There has been information about how characters in the yaoi comics were pushed to be seen as underage.

CBLDF or Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is a consulting group that helps people charged with obscene comic related cases and the people representing them. The CBLDF believes comics should be treated as any other form of expression. If you’d like to find out more about them or if you wish to donate, visit CBLDF.org

The image above is more of an expression of emotion than anything else.

Feel free to drop a comment here with your view or post in the recent related forum thread about this case and how it impacts manga.