Tokyo Court Orders U.S. IT Firm to Pay Damages over Pirated Manga

Tokyo, Nov. 19 (Jiji Press)–Tokyo District Court on Wednesday ordered U.S. information technology company Cloudflare Inc. to pay about 500 million yen in damages for assisting copyrights violations by pirated manga websites. In the lawsuit, major Japanese publishers Kadokawa Corp., Kodansha Ltd., Shueisha Inc. and Shogakukan Inc. had sought damages totaling 560 million yen from San Francisco-based Cloudflare, claiming that the U.S. firm’s services used for the distribution of pirated manga content infringe on copyrights. The U.S. company offers content delivery network (CDN) services, which copy data of contracted websites for distribution to its servers located around the world. This was the first ruling by a Japanese court recognizing the responsibility of a CDN operator over the distribution of pirated content. According to the ruling, pirated manga websites used Cloudflare’s CDN services to distribute about 4,000 works for free. In April 2020 and later, the four Japanese publishers requested Cloudflare to delete data on four manga titles, including “Attack on Titan” and “One Piece,” from its servers. But the Cloudflare did not meet the request. At issue in the lawsuit was whether Cloudflare was the main entity in charge of pirated manga distribution. Presiding Judge Aya Takahashi said that Cloudflare was not the main entity, noting that pirated manga website operators uploaded illegal content onto the U.S. company’s servers. Still, the company’s CDN services helped such website operators distribute large amounts of data efficiently, Takahashi said, adding that the distributed content could be easily recognized as pirated data and that Cloudflare could have recognized the copyright infringements. The judge concluded that Cloudflare assisted the copyright infringements by the pirated manga websites, saying that the company had neglected its obligation to suspend its services for the operators a month after receiving the notifications from the four publishers over the irregularities. The four publishes welcomed the ruling, saying in a statement, “We believe this is an important decision given the current situation where piracy site operators often hide their identities and repeatedly conduct large-scale distribution using CDN services from overseas.” “We hope that this judgment will be a step toward ensuring the proper use of CDN services,” they also said. Cloudflare said that the ruling is very regrettable and that it will file an appeal. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]