• by Ray Schultz , Yesterday

Four Japanese publishers have won a judgment of $3.2 million against Cloudflare, which had been accused of hosting servers that enabled manga piracy sites, The Japan Times reports. 

The publishers include Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan and Kadokawa.

The firms had charged that Cloudflare provided servers for sites that delivered pirate copies of manga titles, the Times says.

However, Presiding Judge Aya Takahashi said that Cloudflare was not the main culprit, the Japan Times adds.

Rather, the piracy sites uploaded illegal content onto Cloudflare’s servers, the publishers alleged, according to the Japan Times.

The server for “two massive manga piracy sites that distribute over 4,000 manga titles without permission and rack up 300 million views a month, the Times adds.

The case has been dragging on since 2022. The Tokyo District Court issued its ruling last week.