The Tokyo District Court said on Thursday that the company running a manga piracy website has to pay ¥1.7 billion to three big Japanese publishers.
Judge Masaki Sugiura said the people who ran the website uploaded manga without permission from the publishers. This caused financial harm.
The companies suing, Kadokawa, Shueisha, and Shogakukan, mentioned that the ¥1.7 billion awarded by the court is probably the highest ever in such cases.
They want this lawsuit to discourage other manga piracy websites from illegally sharing content. They initially asked for ¥1.9 billion from Manga-Mura, a piracy site shut down in 2018 due to a copyright law violation investigation.
The compensation was calculated by multiplying the average views with the selling price of the works. Shueisha executive Atsushi Ito expressed approval of the decision.
He stated, “We will keep working to safeguard authors’ works by defending their rights, not just in Japan but also in other countries where significant damage is still happening.”
Ito also mentioned that getting rid of piracy is tough. One problem is domain-hopping. This is when operators switch domain names every two weeks or a month to dodge anti-piracy measures aimed at particular domains.
Dealing with piracy sites operated from overseas is another hurdle. “It’s really hard for foreign authorities to help Japanese companies,” he explained.
Moreover, numerous works are translated into English. The Authorized Books of Japan (ABJ), which tracks illegal digital publications, found 1,207 piracy sites involved in this.
According to ABJ data, about 500 million visits have been made to 10 major English-language manga piracy sites.
He also mentioned that creative works are translated into other languages. Among these, Vietnamese translations form the largest portion of pirated content after English.
The publishers stated that seventeen titles, such as “One Piece,” “Kingdom,” and “Sergeant Keroro,” were unlawfully uploaded to the website.
This site was visited approximately 100 million times each month. Between June 2017 and April 2018, Manga-Mura is believed to have been visited roughly 538 million times, with approximately 73,000 comic books available for reading.
The former operator of Manga-Mura argued that they were only responsible for developing the website’s system and were not administrators. They claimed that some of their actions didn’t violate copyright law at the time.
As per the complaint filed by the plaintiffs, Manga-Mura, regarded as Japan’s biggest manga piracy site, caused an estimated financial loss of around ¥320 billion.
In 2021, the Fukuoka District Court sentenced Romi Hoshino, the operator of the site, to three years in prison. He was ordered to pay a fine amounting to ¥72.57 million.
After the site shut down in 2018, Hoshino left Japan. However, he was arrested in 2019 when Philippine authorities in Manila detained and deported him.