UPDATE! This morning I heard back from the unauthorized Russian translator of SuperFogeys and here’s what I found out:
• Even though there’s 231 pages/strips posted on the site as of today (they’re halfway through the Society of Heroes Origin and just started Chapter 7 – Visiting Day), the first posting was on July 18 of this year–it’s only been running about a week.
• The man in charge of things, “Spinner,” is actually the SECOND translator, having just taken over from the first one, “Dusker.” Dusker asked Spinner to get in touch with me to get my consent, but I beat him to it. Since this has only been going on a week, I choose to believe him.
• Currently, SuperFogeys in Russian has 150 readers. Pretty decent for a week.
• There actually is a link back to this site on the right hand side of the page, and in a couple of other places as well:
Spinner, who seems like a super nice guy, said he’s open to figuring out a way to display the link more prominently. I gave him my suggestion for how to do that, so we’ll see what happens.
Here’s what I’ve decided to do: It’s clear from everything I’ve learned (mostly from you guys) about this that there’s no real financially viable way for me to put a stop to this. It IS illegal because I didn’t authorize it, but international copyright law is such that actually trying to enforce my copyright is near impossible. This is fine because I don’t want to fight it anyway. They’re not making money form it and I love that this is happening. I support the project and the high quality work Dusker and Spinner are doing. In fact, Shylight, a Russian and English speaking SF fan, told me yesterday that the translation is quite good.
So, I’m going to this project my blessing (essentially making it legal) as it does the thing I’ve always wanted to do with SF anyway: get more eyeballs on it. In fact, I hope to get a link to the Russian site placed on this site soon. Might as well fully embrace it.
Thanks to everyone for the input and counsel yesterday. Should be fun watching our Russian friends work their way through the archives and hit some of those big moments we all know are coming.
See the original post on the Russian SuperFogeys here.
