Japan’s Content Overseas Distribution Association (hereafter CODA) announced on January 29 that a Chinese man who was running Bato.to, one of the world’s largest sites hosting pirated manga, has been criminally charged by local authorities on suspicion of violating copyright law. According to the organization, the crackdown was a collaborative effort between Japanese and Chinese publishers and law enforcement.
On November 19 last year, Shanghai police reportedly searched the suspect’s home, seizing computers and other equipment. He subsequently admitted to running a network of approximately 60 piracy sites (including xbato.com, bato.to and mangapark.io), through which he earned upwards of $57,000 USD in ad revenue during peak months. After being arrested and detained, he was released on bail, but is expected to be formally indicted.
According to CODA, the investigation was launched at the request of five major Japanese publishers (KADOKAWA, Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan, and Square Enix), with CODA’s Beijing office filing a criminal complaint with Chinese authorities on September 25, 2025. Additionally, China Literature Limited, a Tencent subsidiary that runs one of the country’s largest online publishing platforms, also confirmed that its titles were being hosted on the sites in question, and joined in filing the complaint. While the sites remained online for some time after the suspected operator was detained in order to preserve evidence, all 60 sites were confirmed offline by January 19.
Given that Bato.to attracted a combined 7.2 billion visits over the 37-month period from October 2022 to October 2025, CODA considers this a big “victory” against piracy of Japanese content, calculating that the economic impact amounts to over $5 billion USD. They report that after Bato.to’s closure, the US-targeted manga platform MangaPlaza saw its daily sales roughly double.
Variations of those will just pop up elsewhere. It’s a never-ending war.
That’s messed up. I know he knew the risks but folks who benefited from the site could have kept things better considering someone could face legal charges. It was always a strange feeling seeing folks randomly drop these type of links in social media comic ads. Obviously companies wouldn’t be too keen on that.
And then sales on pay sites doubled shortly after? Like why tf were they pirating if they could afford it to begin with? Granted buying stories page by page instead of a solid copy is the biggest scam ever. Though why purchase scams when there are free legal sites out there too? But now that puts him in even more hot water for losses those companies could claim. And that all falls on one person when all these people hopping on page sales now were a part too.
I’ll be real I believe in people getting their dues for their art and that shouldn’t be taken away from them. But I also believe in many ways pirating can keep certain discontinued art alive and circulating. In addition it’s not like all these companies have given proper dues to artists fully either. There’s so many pros and cons to these things. If only there were a happy medium.
im just waiting for more sites to reappear