Cloudflare fined over $3 million in Japan for manga piracy
A Tokyo District Court has ordered Cloudflare to pay $3.2 million to major Japanese publishers after finding the American company guilty of hosting servers for manga piracy sites.
A Tokyo District Court has ordered Cloudflare to pay $3.2 million to major Japanese publishers after finding the American company guilty of hosting servers for manga piracy sites.
Four major publishing companies — Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan and Kadokawa — have accused Cloudflare of copyright infringement for its role in hosting sites that distribute pirated copies of manga. The lawsuit was filed back in 2022, The Japan Times reports .
«The court ruling obliges [Cloudflare] to pay a total of 500 million yen», the publishers said in a joint statement.
It notes that the company provided a server for «two major manga pirate sites that distribute over 4,000 manga titles without permission and receive 300 million views per month.» Cloudflare reportedly plans to appeal.
Pirate sites, which distribute copies of graphic novels for free, have long been a concern for manga publishers such as One Piece and Attack on Titan, with losses estimated at millions of dollars in Japan alone.
Publishers had previously demanded that Cloudflare stop providing services to the pirate site, and in 2019 they managed to reach an agreement. However, Japan later stated that the American company continued to provide servers to pirate sites.
Recall that on November 18, a Cloudflare network outage knocked out thousands of websites around the world and in Ukraine for several hours. The company published a report and admitted that it was not a hacker attack, but an internal bug .
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