Attack on Titan: Four Japanese Manga publishers sue Cloudflare Four major Manga publishers are set to sue internet-grooming firm Cloudflare, on grounds its content delivery network facilitates piracy of their wares. The four companies – Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan and Kadokawa – together dominate the market for Japanese comics and own many iconic properties. The publishers also …
well, to their credit, Cloudflare appears to take at least SOME complaints seriously, but as they're NOT some kind of police force or "enforcement arm of the CANCEL CULTURE" (thankfully) it appears that if they are satisfied the content they host was pirated they'll take it down from their network.
Isn't that ALL you can REALLY ask ANY reputable service provider? (anything BEYOND that can quickly become CANCEL CULTURE, or worse, PREDATORY TAKE-DOWNS of COMPETITORS)
And, I would guess, that it might be a good idea for manga publishers to do MORE (English) translations of their works (or license it to those who do it), so that the fan-scanners won't need to do it FOR them. Often these quasi-pirate organizations exist ONLY because the works are unavailable to the rest of the world through any other (legal) means.
They null-route their e-mail abuse contact so I've used their abuse phone number a few times for them anonymizing phishing store fronts with prolific referral spammers. They literally told me to call the police and not bother them.
Pirates are a big part of Cloudflare's business model. That's why they always refuse to take anything down until you get a court order.
Getting a retraining order from a federal court starts at ten thousand dollars. Because you have to hire lawyers, go to court and pay a ton of fees. Oh, and you often have to first sue the pirate to prove to the court that they don't have the rights to what they're posting.
Not a lot of people can afford it. Cloudflare KNOWS this. Hence why they NEVER take anything down without a court order.
It's a scam.
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Well actually here in Italy around Christmas all ISP DNS servers suddenly stopped resolving mangadex.org, one of the main manga scanslation hosting sites (unaffected by this latest lawsuit because it uses another CDN, not Cloudflare's) likely due do some court order instigated by some local licensor. Oh well, that finally got me to pull that long-forgotten Raspberry Pi out of its drawer and install a PiHole on my LAN...
Note: I'm a staunch supporter of the manga industry – I purchase around € 100 of local editions montly, and sometimes digital Japanese editions that I don't usually even bother to download because I just want to support the authors with my money – but sadly for some of them there's zero chance of ever being licensed abroad. And I'm not even talking about hentai, just risqué stuff...
Icon: response from the ISP upstream servers.
So if these pirates don't use cloudflare they'll find some other way to host their websites. Doesn't seem like a smart use of their money.
IMHO it would be easier to make their content more easily accessible legally. Things like English language websites and putting pressure on western credit card companies to actually accept payments for their content (because a lot of it is blocked), because OMG nipples or something...
Manga themselves seem to have been relatively accepted and embraced in much of the world, but accessibility from outside Japan still leaves a lot to be desired it seems with many many hoops to jump through.
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