The Tokyo District Court has handed down a ruling in a lawsuit where four major Japanese manga publishers sought roughly 500 million yen (about $3.2 million USD) in damages from Cloudflare, arguing that the US company illegally contributed to the distribution of manga piracy sites. On November 19, the court accepted the publishers’ claims of copyright infringement and ordered Cloudflare to pay the full amount, as reported by Asahi Shimbun.
The lawsuit was filed back in 2022 by publishers Shueisha, Kadokawa, Kodansha and Shogakukan. The four companies alleged that pirated versions of hit manga like Attack on Titan and One Piece had been distributed using Cloudflare’s services. They claimed that between April 2020 and December 2021, roughly 70 million to 2 billion chapters per month were viewed illegally, causing enormous losses.
While Cloudflare obviously doesn’t run piracy websites itself, the plaintiffs argued that it “assisted” illegal activity by facilitating the distribution of sites hosting pirated manga. “It provides the CDN (Content Delivery Network) service that copies (caches) data sent from the original site’s server and delivers it from a server close to the user. This helped reduce data traffic and made it easier for users in Japan to access overseas piracy sites.”
The publishers argued that Cloudflare bore liability because it continued providing its services even after being notified that the sites in question were infringing copyrights. Cloudflare countered that it was just passively transmitting data, shifting responsibility to the actual sender (owners of the piracy websites). According to Japanese media, what Cloudfare did (copying copyrighted works for the purpose of improving transmission) is not generally considered illegal, but the exception is when the act unfairly harms the interests of the copyright holder. After more than three and a half years of legal proceedings, the Tokyo District Court seems to have ruled that Cloudfare’s case falls under this exception.
