News China shut down pirated Japanese anime site

In a rare move, the Chinese government, acting on behalf of the Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), based in Tokyo, and six production companies, including Toho and NHK, shut down a Chinese website that illegally distributed Japanese anime. In February, authorities for China's Jiangsu province detained a 33-year-old man who operated b9good and held him responsible for violating China's copyright law. He is accused of generating over 100 million JPY (USD 765,000) in advertising income.

The portal b9good, which began operations around 2008, illegally hosted live-action television dramas uploaded almost immediately after the broadcast. The closure is believed to be the first-ever law enforcement action against a pirated content site. The Motion Picture Association of America identified b9good as a "notoriously infringing" website focused on the Japanese market in a report issued in 2018. [...] This appears to be the first full-scale investigation against an alleged Chinese pirate site following a request from the Japanese side, CODA said. "This will become a model case for cracking down on overseas operators" of pirate sites, said Takero Goto, CODA representative director. Operators of online pirate sites are difficult to trace since they often hide their identities behind proxy networks. Authorities gathered information about b9good with the help of "white hat" hackers.

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In Japan, authorities responded to the growing economic loss from piracy by arresting the head of the illegal link tracker site Mangamura in 2019. Though the site was closed, copycats have arisen. The demand for pirated content grew during the COVID pandemic.


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The former operator of the now-defunct manga piracy website Mangamura has been ordered to pay approximately 1.7 billion JPY (equivalent to USD 11.01 million) in damages to three major Japanese publishers. The Tokyo District Court, in a lawsuit filed by Kadokawa Corp., Shueisha Inc., and Shogakukan Inc., ruled that the operator infringed on their rights by publishing popular manga on the internet without permission.



Notably, this record-breaking claim is the largest ever in a lawsuit related to a piracy site. Between February 2016 (when the site opened) and April 2018 (when it was closed), Mangamura posted approximately 8,200 pirated copies of manga and magazines, equivalent to about 73,000 volumes, without authorization. The site garnered a staggering maximum of nearly 100 million monthly hits during that period. The publishers estimated the total damages to be around 320 billion JPY and sought compensation from the suspected mastermind behind the site.