I'm sure most of you are probably aware of the incident that happened awhile back with Kazusa Takashima and Kayono (see http://community.livejournal.com/takashimakazusa/4863.html for details (Kayono ripped off several scenes from Takashima's Wild Rock.))

http://kayono_kenshou.at.infoseek.co.jp/kenshougazou.html has some pages that show obvious comparisons and evidence of plagiarism.

This was probably one of the reasons why Takashima suddenly went MIA in the middle of serializing some of her projects (*tear*), but I'm curious to know what yaoi fans have to say about it? Especially since I'm not familiar with the reactions of Takashima's fanbase.

Also, artistic originality is definitely one of those redhot issues in the manga community - I assume that the competition and pressures for mangaka to meet deadlines while producing work that sells is getting worse and worse. Do you guys think that even slight "copying" of other artists' works could ever be justified??

Well there's enough manga out there that at some point or another things like poses or character designs will look similar. In the Takashima and Kayono incident, however the action scenes were just too spot on. I mean I honestly believe its fine when a certain picture inspires one to draw something similar. But it was just like she redrew the scenes w/ her characters.

well... um... I can't read the livjournal post so I've just seen the comparisons between the picture... who copied whom??

Kayono, a hentai artist, obviously ripped off several scenes from Takashima's Wild Rock.

If you go to that link I mentioned above, you can definitely see the comparison.

Kayono's mother's also a famous mangaka, and after this issue broke out she condemned/bashed Takashima, Takashima's works and the BL manga genre publicly.

So Takashima felt like she lost her case and sort of abandoned all her projects for awhile (but she's starting to make a come back now.)

O.O oh my god... I can't believe this... some people really do not have any scruples... I mean many are using references but here it is so obvious that Kayano just drew EXACTLY the same

kayano's works aren't even that good, i only read one of her oneshots and completely stopped reading her other works since they sucked so much. It's no wonder that she would even stoop to steal ideas from other mangaka's. In her case turn the yaoi plot into the shojo plot.
Its sad that she won the case just cuz Takashima was doing a yaoi genre, stealing is stealing. Dude, she just went into my most hated mangaka's ever list.How could she do that to Takashima?!

thanks for the link gizmo, her illustrations are really gorgeous ::yum:: Xd
I hope she's still going to continue writing more manga, and I hope that Kayano goes out of business. People should boycott her manga's!

There is no excuse for artistic plagiarism- Even if you use other pieces as inspiration, here in the states at least, you're required to cite them. I haven't read up on the whole incident, so maybe I'm missing something, but shouldn't there have been some legal action? Does anyone know anything about Japanese copyright and intellectual property laws and/or how they played out in this case?