Japanese Publishers Win Against Cloudflare In The Piracy Lawsuit of 2018

In this digital era, piracy of media is hard to control as a big chunk of viewers prefer to enjoy content while at the same time not support the creators for their hard work.

Anime and manga are no exception and looks like the law is striking down on such behavior.

Shueisha, Shogakukan, Kodansha, and Kadokawa, major Japanese publishers, filed a lawsuit in 2018 against the American web security company Cloudflare for hosting pirated content on their servers. The lawsuit ended with publishers’ victory.

Shuppan Koho Center recently announced that they have reached a settlement, and the publishers scored a major victory in the war against piracy. #SAYNOTOPIRACY

Cloudflare has agreed to stop caching content from piracy websites specified by the Tokyo District Court for copyright infringement.

The lawsuit was set in motion in August 2018, wherein the publishers requested Cloudflare to stop hosting content for several piracy websites.

It was claimed that Cloudflare was aware that these websites were using their servers to offer copyrighted content illegally and went along with it anyway.

Among other services, Cloudflare can act as an intermediary between a server and its end users, providing content even when the original server is facing connection issues or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

However, this isn’t the only lawsuit filed against Cloudflare as Takeshobo; another publisher took up arms against copyright infringement as well.

This is a solid win for the publishers as websites such as Hoshi no Romi and Mangamura (successor) have been taken down!

About Shonen Jump:

On September 22, 2014, the free Shōnen Jump+ mobile app and website were launched in Japan. It sells digital versions of the Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine, simultaneous with its print release, and tankōbon volumes of individual Jump series past and present.

However, it also has extensive samples of the manga that can be read for free. There are also series that are serialized exclusively on the app, which, unlike in Shonen Jump, maybe aimed at adult men or women.

These exclusive series are later published in print tankōbon volumes under the Jump Comics+ imprint.