Four major Japanese manga (comic book) publishers announced Monday that they will sue an American company they accuse of hosting ‘web’ servers that offer their pirated works, a global phenomenon that has increased as a result of the COVID pandemic.
This lawsuit would be filed later this week before a Tokyo court, a spokesman for Kodansha, one of the affected companies, told AFP.
This Japanese publisher and three others, Shueisha, Shogakukan and Kadokawa, accuse the American Cloudflare of violating intellectual property, as a platform for a large number of sites that offer their pirated manga.
One of these distributes 4,000 pirated manga, registering some 300 million monthly visits, according to a source close to the case.
The four plaintiffs will claim a total of 400 million yen (3.1 million euros, almost 3.5 million dollars) for damages from Cloudflare, according to the source.
An amount that can be considered symbolic since manga piracy on the Internet has become a massive phenomenon, and has caused a loss of profit of at least 780,000 million yen (6,000 million euros) to these publishers only in the period January-October 2021, according to an estimate by ABJ, an intellectual property defense organization.
AFP tried to contact Cloudflare, but it was not immediately possible. This company had reached a friendly agreement in 2019 precisely with the four affected publishers, but did not respect its commitment not to host “pirate” sites anymore.
Source: Gestion
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