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Asahi, Kyodo: 4 Japanese Publishers to Sue Cloudflare for Offering Data Services to Manga Piracy Sites

The Asahi Shimbun paper and the news agency Kyodo reported on Sunday that the Japanese publishers Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan, and Kadokawa have decided to file a lawsuit against the American Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare early next month in the Tokyo District Court. The lawsuit will allege that Cloudflare distributes data for manga piracy sites that infringe on the publishers' copyrights, and it will seek an injunction and about 400 million yen (about US$3.5 million) in compensation for damages.

According to Asahi and Kyodo's sources, Cloudflare has contracts with major piracy sites to distribute data from servers within Japan, even though the piracy sites' administrators are located overseas. The sites allegedly distribute about 4,000 titles (including such popular ones as One Piece, Attack on Titan, and Kingdom) and receive over 300 million accesses a month.

Cloudflare told Asahi, "We are not directly involved in copyright infringement. Our company is not the root of the problem."

Background

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.

The Japanese-language manga piracy site Mangamura became inaccessible in April 2018, after Japanese publishers had filed criminal complaints against the website from summer to fall of 2017. Japanese authorities confirmed in May 2018 that they were actively investigating Mangamura. Police have since made several arrests related to uploading unauthorized images on the site.

Kadokawa, Kodansha, Shueisha, and Shogakukan's lawyers then filed a motion with the Tokyo District Court in August 2018, requesting Cloudflare to stop hosting content for several piracy websites. According to the motion, the manga piracy websites for which Cloudflare had offered services included Hoshi no Romi, an apparent "Mangamura successor" website.

Shuppan Kōhō Center announced in February 2020 that Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan, and Kadokawa had reached a settlement with Cloudflare in June 2019. Cloudflare agreed to stop caching content on its Japanese servers from specified piracy websites if the Tokyo District Court deems that the sites are infringing on copyrights.

The same four publishers then filed a lawsuit in New York Southern District Court on September 2019 against the unnamed administrators of website Hoshi no Romi and three other United States-hosted websites. The plaintiffs claimed that the sites hosted over 93,000 scanned volumes of manga.

Japanese publisher Takeshobo and a male manga creator filed a lawsuit with the Tokyo District Court against Cloudflare in January 2020. The lawsuit alleged that Cloudflare was complicit in copyright infringement by offering its services to manga piracy sites.

In November 2021, a California District Court allowed Shueisha to request Google and other Internet firms to disclose the operators of Japanese-language pirate website Manga Bank. Shueisha had previously subpoenaed Cloudflare under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to discover Manga Bank's domains.

Sources: Mainichi (Kyodo) via Otakomu, Asahi (Yasukazu Akada) via Yahoo! Japan