For years, the illegal manga portals operated in a kind of gray area, the sites distributed works without the corresponding rights, while the infrastructure that kept them fast and protected, services such as Cloudflare He disregarded the problem, claiming simple “neutrality” That stage came to an end today, thanks to a process that involved the most important manga companies.
The District Court of Tokyo He ruled in favor of the four titans of the manga industry, Shueisha, Kadokawa, Kodansha and Shogakukan, forcing the American company Cloudflare to pay 500 million yen (3.2 million dollars). But don’t get confused, the money paid by the American company is the least important. What is truly historical and of utmost importance is that justice has officially declared that the Web acceleration technology can be complicit in a crime.
The end of the excuse: Anime piracy faces serious problems
To understand why this ruling is revolutionary, we must analyze the technical argument. Cloudflare offers services of CDN (Content Delivery Network). Basically, save copies of a web to servers around the world to load fast.
Although this is not all, since thanks to the technologies of the platform it is possible to save significantly operational costs that allow operating from small servers, largely because these developed technologies allow much of the traffic to be processed by Cloudflare and not by the source server. In a few words, the source server only serves to supply the material and it is the American company that processes almost all requests. the defense of Cloudflare It was classic: “We only passively transmit data, we do not control the content”.
The Japanese court destroyed this argument and determined that Cache (Copy) The pirated content on your Japanese servers to speed up the load, Cloudflare I was not being passive; was Optimizing the crime. Without the speed of Cloudflare, these pirate sites (receiving 300 million visits per month) would be slow and unstable, so they would be highly expensive to operate and easily distribute content that they do not have copyrights. In simple terms, Cloudflare He didn’t steal the bench, but put the turbo-loaded leak car and paved the road for the thieves.
4,000 titles and an ignored warning
The lawsuit, originally filed in 2022, revealed the true scale of the problem. titles of enormous commercial weight such as one piece, , KINGDOM or Attack on Titan RThey registered between 70 million and up to 2 billion illegal readings each month, a level of piracy that far exceeds any previous estimate and that evidenced the direct economic impact on authors and publishers.
But what really sank the American company was not only the fact of providing technical support to these portals, but also its lack of action. The plaintiffs showed that Cloudflare continued to offer protection and infrastructure services to several of these sites, Even after you have received multiple formal infringement notices. In other words, it was not just an omission, it was a deliberate continuity of the service despite knowing the illegal activity.
Although the fine fixed 500 million yen may seem modest compared to the 3.6 billion yen in estimated losses, publishers never sought to recover all the economic damage. In reality, they limited their claim to a fraction with a clear objective: to expedite the judicial process and get what they really needed, a Solid legal precedent. And they got it. The sentence opens the door to future actions against any company that hides in “neutrality” while technically supporting piracy sites.
What does this mean for the future of the Internet?
This is the critical point that your competition is not seeing. By establishing that an infrastructure provider is responsible for “facilitating the efficiency” of piracy, the door is opened to sue other tech giants.
If Cloudflare may be held responsible for accelerating and stabilizing the load of these portals, an inevitable question arises, What will happen then with platforms like Google, which index them, or with the payment processors that facilitate their donations and memberships? The ruling issued in Tokyo sends a message that transcends borders: the alleged technological neutrality ceases to be a valid defense when a company obtains direct or indirect benefits from traffic generated by illegal activities.
Verdict: Pirate infrastructure is under siege
The legal triumph of Shueisha and the other publishers marks a turning point in the fight against digital piracy. The strategy is no longer focused solely on persecuting the hidden administrator after an anonymous domain, but on holding the formal companies that support the infrastructure where these sites thrive. If companies like Cloudflare choose to cut services preventively to avoid new sanctions, the pirate ecosystem could face drastic degradation in speed, stability and accessibility.
This change of course opens a complex debate: is it legitimate to demand responsibility from infrastructure providers for the content that circulates through their services, or are we shifting the blame too far from the origin? To what extent is this type of pressure necessary to protect the work of the mangakas and the entire creative chain? Share your technical and ethical perspective in the comments!
