Legal Tokyo District Court orders Cloudflare to pay ¥470m for facilitating manga piracy

The Tokyo District Court had instructed the U.S.-based cloud service provider Cloudflare to pay roughly 500 million yen in damages, after concluding that its services had effectively enabled the operator of a manga piracy site to infringe the copyrights of several major publishers. The court accepted almost the full amount sought by the publishers behind well-known series such as One Piece and Attack on Titan, and the plaintiffs were viewing the ruling as the first time in Japan that a company handling cached digital transfers had been held responsible for such a loss. Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan and Kadokawa brought the case forward.

Cloudflare had a contract with one of the largest illegal sites. It provided a content delivery network service, temporarily duplicating data from piracy site servers and distributing it to large numbers of users. Presiding Judge Aya Takahashi found that Cloudflare had simplified its identification procedure, enabling the piracy site operator, remaining anonymous, to efficiently distribute pirated copies. "[Cloudflare] failed in its duty to stop providing the service," the judge said, noting that the company did not suspend it even after the publishing houses had notified it of the copyright infringement. Cloudflare had argued that it was the website operator that transmitted the data and that it was unaware of the infringement.

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Cloudflare plans to appeal the ruling, warning that letting it stand would seriously affect the efficiency and reliability of the internet.

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