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Shueisha, Kodansha, Shogakukan, Kadokawa Win Copyright Suit Against Cloudflare

The Tokyo District Court has ruled on Wednesday that American internet infrastructure company Cloudflare is liable for damages in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Japanese publishers Shueisha, Kodansha, Shogakukan, and Kadokawa in 2022.

The ruling recognized about 3.6 billion yen (about US$24 million) in damages to the four publishers, but since the publishers only claimed a portion of the damages suffered was due to Cloudflare, Cloudflare was ordered to pay a total amount of about 500 million yen (about US$3.3 million).

The four publishers issued a joint statement on Wednesday to announce the court's ruling, and stated that the ruling will lead to the prevention of misuse of CDN (content delivery network) services such as Cloudflare. The joint statement added that the companies will continue to protect the rights and works of creators, and will continue to take firm action against copyright infringement. The publishers emphasized their belief that CDN services are beneficial when used for "stable and efficient delivery of legitimate content to users."

The lawsuit filed in 2022 alleged that Cloudflare distributes data for manga piracy sites that infringe on the publishers' copyrights, and it sought both an injunction and about 460 million yen (about US$4 million at that time) in compensation for damages.

Kodansha then alleged in the lawsuit that Cloudflare's policy of only requiring an email address to register for free allows piracy sites to hide their identity, and that Cloudflare has allowed multiple piracy sites collecting advertising revenue to operate. The court's ruling on Wednesday emphasized Cloudflare's liability by failing to implement stricter identity verification procedures.

In past reports by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper and the Kyodo news service, their sources claimed that Cloudflare has contracts with major piracy sites to distribute data from servers within Japan, even though the piracy sites' administrators are located overseas. The sites allegedly distribute over 4,000 titles (including such popular ones as One Piece, Attack on Titan, and Kingdom) and receive over 300 million accesses a month.

Background

Among other services, Cloudflare can act as an intermediary between a server and its end users, delivering content even when the original server is facing connection issues or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

The Japanese-language manga piracy site Mangamura became inaccessible in April 2018, after Japanese publishers had filed criminal complaints against the website from summer to fall of 2017. Japanese authorities confirmed in May 2018 that they were actively investigating Mangamura. Police have since made several arrests related to uploading unauthorized images on the site.

Kadokawa, Kodansha, Shueisha, and Shogakukan's lawyers then filed a motion with the Tokyo District Court in August 2018, requesting Cloudflare to stop hosting content for several piracy websites. According to the motion, the manga piracy websites for which Cloudflare had offered services included Hoshi no Romi, an apparent "Mangamura successor" website.

Shuppan Kōhō Center announced in February 2020 that Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan, and Kadokawa had reached a settlement with Cloudflare in June 2019. Cloudflare agreed to stop caching content on its Japanese servers from specified piracy websites if the Tokyo District Court deems that the sites are infringing on copyrights.

The same four publishers then filed a lawsuit in New York Southern District Court in September 2019 against the unnamed administrators of website Hoshi no Romi and three other United States-hosted websites. The plaintiffs claimed that the sites hosted over 93,000 scanned volumes of manga.

Japanese publisher Takeshobo and a male manga creator filed a lawsuit with the Tokyo District Court against Cloudflare in January 2020. The lawsuit alleged that Cloudflare was complicit in copyright infringement by offering its services to manga piracy sites.

In November 2021, a California District Court allowed Shueisha to request Google and other Internet firms to disclose the operators of Japanese-language pirate website Manga Bank. Shueisha had previously subpoenaed Cloudflare under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to discover Manga Bank's domains.

Shueisha, Kadokawa, Shogakukan, and Kodansha are all part of Japan's Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), which launched the International Anti-Piracy Organization (IAPO) in April 2022 with organizations from more than 12 other countries. IAPO works to curb the piracy of manga and anime and also assist law enforcement with criminal investigations in the field, especially when those criminal investigations require cooperation from law enforcement in multiple countries.

Source: Comic Natalie