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Website Maintainers Charged for Posting Manga Scripts Without Authorization

The Fukuoka Prefectural Police filed charges of copyright infringement against a company and a 44-year-old male employee who allegedly maintained a "spoiler site" that posted nearly complete text from manga chapters without authorization.

According to the charges, the Tokyo-based company and the employee from Kanazawa City posted dialogue and images from chapters 60 and 62 of Yabako Sandrovich's Kengan Omega manga (pictured right) on May 7 and 21. They allegedly viewed the chapters on Shogakukan's Manga ONE app, laid out the story in text with screenshots from the manga, and made it available on the site. According to the authorities, the suspects admitted to the charges.

In a statement posted on Thursday, the Manga ONE app's editors revealed that the site was "Manga-ru ~Muryō Manga Kansō Netabareview" (Manga-ru ~Free Manga Impressions and Spoilereviews~ [sic]), which hosted not only content for Kengan Omega, but many other manga titles. The editors clarified while the site (pictured below) had few images, it posted the scripts from those manga extensively, "virtually unchanged."

The statement further noted that Shogakukan had first requested the site's service provider to close the site in May 2020, and then Shogakukan requested the personally identifiable information of the site's maintainers. The Tokyo District Court ruled in March 2021 that unauthorized posting of manga dialogue text is considered copyright infringement, and the court ordered that the maintainers' information be disclosed to Shogakukan. Shogakukan alleged in that request that the maintainers had posted nearly the entire dialogue text of 63 chapters of Kengan Omega without authorization, from January 2019 to May 2020.

In March 2021, Kodansha began taking legal action against "several accounts & individuals" to prevent illegal uploads and early leaks of Hajime Isayama's Attack on Titan manga's final chapter. The manga's editor specifically said during the announcement last year that the company is working to prevent leaks of text, along with images, and will pursue illegal uploaders "regardless of country."

Publishers have previously taken legal actions against people who posted images without authorization. Police previously arrested a then-14-year-old middle-school student in 2010 for illegally distributing One Piece and other manga before their official release dates. Police have been making similar arrests for piracy over at least the past two decades.

Sandrovich launched Kengan Ashura with Daromeon's illustrations in the Manga ONE app in 2012 and ended the series in August 2018, but the new Kengan Omega arc launched in the Manga ONE app in January 2019.

Sources: Mainichi Shimbun, Jiji.com, Manga One