Scans: o papel da pirataria no acesso à cultura e informação no Brasil

Abstract

Scans is an abbreviation for scanlation which, in turn, is a contraction of scanning and translation. They are groups of people who work collaboratively and unpaid to translate Asian comics (manga, manhuas, manhwas, webtoons, webcomics and light novels), usually from English and/or Spanish into Portuguese. These groups operate primarily in the digital environment, through their own websites, blogs and social networks, where they make a wide variety of works available to a wide variety of audiences. Because these works are protected by the Copyright Law (Law No. 9,610 of February 19, 1998), the activity of scans is classified as piracy, since the teams translate and release the works on the web for anyone to read. There are publishers who sell some of these works in Brazil, although with a much smaller variety and at prices that make it impossible for a large part of the Brazilian reading population to buy them. The general aim of this work is to start a discussion about the democratic role of piracy in access to foreign literary works, by debating how the Brazilian socio-economic scenario can contribute to the continuation of piracy by blocking access for the population. The specific objectives are: to typify and explain how scans are organized/function in the digital environment; to characterize the formats of literary works sought by the target audience; to contextualize the socio-economic conditions of Brazilians; to understand what leads this audience to resort to piracy. To this end, the methodological tools used were: bibliographical research, documentary research and the application of an online questionnaire. This is an exploratory-descriptive study, with an inductive approach and descriptive statistical technique and analysis. A questionnaire was drawn up for online application containing fifteen questions on the subject, with questions aimed at creating a profile of the participants, such as age, education and income; as well as questions aimed at the participants' relationship with online activity around scans, how many works they follow and what they think about piracy. The result was 80 answers which, together with the bibliographic survey, served as a basis for debating the relationship between Brazilian reading habits, the socio-economic aspects that limit access to culture for a large part of the population and piracy, which sometimes appears as the only resource for these people to have access to cultural materials. Finally, it was noted that most of the consumer public are high school and college students, few of whom work and even these don't mean that they can spend part of their income on culture, leaving piracy as a means of access and since scans act virtually, integration with technology makes this whole process even easier. Publishers have to look for ways to make the works they publish in Brazil cheaper and increase both quantity and variety, which are also points that lead readers to seek out scans.