Mangamura, the large online manga comic sharing website that was closed earlier this year for piracy of copyrighted manga, is now facing deeper scrutiny. Vast records from its online server company (an American company, Cloudflare) have been served up to the Tokyo District Court. The litigating manga artist’s lawyer announced this on October 27, 2018.
The manga artist, residing in Tokyo, sued Cloudflare (a major Internet cloud network platform company) for records of access by the administrator of Mangamura to Cloudflare in April. The artist’s lawyer explained that Cloudflare gave the litigant records in August. On the basis of this, the actual identity of the secret host of Mangamura was determined. This is a first for Cloudflare to be sued in Japan for information on clients.
Anger that Mangamura was forcibly closed over copyright infringement will probably be compounded by this revelation that the host’s personally identifying information was yielded. The suing manga artist might sue the host now, but as pointed out, the market for digitized manga is large yet conventional manga publishers are not catering to it. Punishing the piracy promoters of Mangamura may not lead to long-lasting support for the manga artists of Japan, as noted in an article from May.
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Taro Yaguchi
Sources
Nikkei Shimbun, “「漫画村」の運営者特定 米取引先、東京地裁でも開示 [Mangamura manager identified: American connection reveals to Tokyo District Court],” October 27, 2018.
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