Four of Japan’s largest manga publishers have filed a lawsuit against Cloudflare on charges of piracy.
Four well-known manga publishers have sued the US company Cloudflare in order to prevent piracy of their published works. In this regard, copyright and piracy have been a serious problem for many years and now these publishers may have found a way to put a stop to various unspecified sites. This could provide an avenue for other publishers to make the same decision in the future should the lawsuit be successful or at least have some influence.
How will publishers deal with manga and anime piracy?
Piracy represents one of the main concerns of publishers around the world, with few possible solutions. While some sites have been shut down for several years, others have operated largely unrestricted. At the moment, Japan’s manga publishers have finally turned to the Tokyo District Court.
On his official Twitter account, VIZ shared a link to an official statement from Shueisha, showing the lawsuit in more detail. In it, too Kadokawa, Kodansha and Shagakukan are included in the lawsuit. These publishers are suing Cloudflare, Inc., a US company based in San Francisco. The purpose of said lawsuit is “an injunction against the transmission and public reproduction of pirated content and compensation for damages.” As well as “The amount of damages claimed is based on one work of each plaintiff, and 4 million dollars in total for 4 works as a partial claim.”
This lawsuit could be a good solution to curb some comic book piracy attemptswhich could spread to other publishers taking similar actions if the companies are found guilty of failing to take adequate steps to crack down on misuse of their services, which is the main accusation leveled against Cloudflare.
Cloudflare, according to the statement released by Shueisha, is “one of the largest content delivery network (CDN) providers in the world.” In fact, the manga publisher claims that Nine of the top ten most trafficked hacking sites use Cloudflare services. In this same statement, Shueisha makes several criticisms of the CDN provider’s methods; Firstly, its lack of limitation for free service and its ability to hide the IP addresses of site operators, thus preventing action against them by manga publishers. The statement also specifies the actions that Shueisha and its plaintiff partners that Cloudflare should take with respect to the case. These include stopping “public broadcasts through Cloudflare’s server”, stopping “temporary caching of Cloudflare’s servers in Japan”, and finally canceling “contracts with hacking site operators that are clearly illegal”. .
Shueisha also comments that the company has spent years trying to remedy this situation with Cloudflare, however, the latter has an “uncooperative attitude … in response to cooperation in the fight against piracy.” For its part, shutting down piracy sites for good hasn’t been an easy task for many comics publishers or other creative firms, and concentrating on eradicating a single site has rarely been effective in the long run, with so many constantly popping up. other sites to take the place of the closed ones. However, cutting out a crucial aspect of the sites’ infrastructure altogether might prove to be a more effective measure.
The comic, among many other creative works, has long faced piracy of materials on the Internet. In relation to manga piracy, this fact produces many fan translations and before the works are even licensed by the companies in many cases. This lawsuit could seriously alter the landscape of manga piracy – as well as comics on a worldwide scale – if the courts rule in favor of Shueisha, Kadokawa, Kodansha and Shagakukan or if Cloudflare chooses to voluntarily make changes outside of court.
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