In 2022, four Japanese publishing companies, including Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan and Kadokawa, sued internet service provider Cloudflare for hosting pirated content for a number of websites, causing the companies significant losses.
According to the lawsuit filed, Cloudflare hosted content and provided access to over 4,000 manga comic titles to two major pirated websites with approximately 300 million views per month.
After three years, the judge in the case, Aya Takahashi, reportedly ordered Cloudflare to pay a total of 500 million yen (~RM13.2 million) to the four companies as compensation for hosting the pirated manga content.
The judge said that although Cloudflare was not guilty of uploading the pirated content to their US-based servers, their services were used by these pirated websites to upload the content arbitrarily.
Cloudflare was also said to have known that these websites were uploading pirated content, but did nothing to curb the issue, and therefore, these companies had no choice but to sue Cloudflare.
In 2019, these companies reportedly reached an agreement for Cloudflare to no longer host pirated websites, but it is still seen to be rampant, and therefore, lawsuit proceedings against Cloudflare have been initiated.
Cloudflare is also reported to be filing an appeal against the decision made by the Tokyo court.
