For years, illegal manga portals operated in a kind of gray zone, the sites distributed works without having the corresponding rights, while the infrastructure that kept them fast and protected, services such as cloudflare he ignored the problem by simply claiming “neutrality“That stage came to an end today, thanks to a process that involved the most important manga companies.
He District Court of Tokyo ruled in favor of the four titans of the manga industry, Shueisha, Kadokawa, Kodansha and Shogakukanforcing the American company cloudflare to pay 500 million yen ($3.2 million). But don't be confused, the money the American company paid is the least important. What is truly historic and extremely important is that justice has officially declared that the web acceleration technology can be an accessory to 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 CDN (Content Delivery Network). Basically, it saves copies of a website on servers around the world so that it loads quickly.
Although this is not all, since thanks to the platform technologies it is possible to significantly save operating costs that allow operating from small servers, largely because these developed technologies allow a large part of the traffic to be processed by cloudflare and not by the origin server. In short, the origin 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 transmit data passively, we do not control the content”.
The Japanese court destroyed this argument and determined that at cache (copy) pirated content on their Japanese servers to speed up loading, cloudflare I wasn't being passive; was optimizing crime. Without the speed of cloudflarethese pirate sites (which received 300 million visits per month) would be slow and unstable, making it too expensive to easily operate and distribute content for which they do not own the copyright. In simple terms, cloudflare He didn't rob the bank, but he put the turbo-charged getaway car in and paved the road for the robbers.
4,000 Titles and an Ignored Warning
The lawsuit, originally filed in 2022, laid bare the true scale of the problem. Titles of enormous commercial weight such as One Piece, Kingdom either Attack on Titan rrecorded between 70 million and up to 2 billion illegal readings each montha level of piracy that far exceeds any previous estimate and which demonstrated 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 demonstrated that cloudflare continued to offer protection and infrastructure services to several of these sites, even after receiving multiple formal infringement notices. In other words, it was not just an omission, it was a deliberate continuity of service despite knowing about the illicit activity.
Although the fine of 500 million yen may seem modest compared to the 3.6 billion yen in estimated lossesthe publishers never sought to recover all of the economic damage. In reality, they limited their claim to a fraction with a clear objective: to speed up the judicial process and obtain what they really needed, a strong legal precedent. And they got it. The ruling opens the door to future actions against any company that hides behind “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, it opens the door to suing other tech giants.
Yeah cloudflare can be held responsible for accelerating and stabilizing the loading of these portals, an inevitable question arises, What will happen then to platforms like Google, which index them, or to the payment processors that facilitate their donations and memberships? The ruling issued in Tokyo sends a message that transcends borders: the supposed technological neutrality ceases to be a valid defense when a company obtains benefits, direct or indirect, from the 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 no longer focuses solely on going after the administrator hiding behind an anonymous domain, but on holding accountable the formal companies that support the infrastructure where these sites thrive. If companies like Cloudflare choose to preemptively cut services to avoid further sanctions, the pirate ecosystem could face a drastic degradation in speed, stability, and accessibility.
This change of course opens up a complex debate: is it legitimate to hold infrastructure providers accountable for the content that circulates through their services, or are we shifting the blame too far from the source? To what extent is this type of pressure necessary to protect the work of mangakas and the entire creative chain? Share your technical and ethical perspective in the comments!
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