{"id":66579,"date":"2022-08-19T09:04:13","date_gmt":"2022-08-19T09:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/?p=66579"},"modified":"2022-08-19T09:04:13","modified_gmt":"2022-08-19T09:04:13","slug":"manga-piracy-new-shueisha-u-s-court-action-indicates-complex-investigation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/?p=66579","title":{"rendered":"Manga Piracy: New Shueisha U.S. Court Action Indicates Complex Investigation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"network-round\"<\/a>In recent years, publishers of Japanese manga comics have been sending a sustained and clear message that content piracy will not be tolerated, wherever it takes place in the world.<\/p>\n

The problems faced by companies including Shueisha, Kadowaka, Kodansha, and Shogakukan, are easy to describe but much more difficult to counter. <\/p>\n

Japan-based pirate site operators serving a domestic audience face experienced local investigators, law enforcement agencies, and a relatively high prospect of criminal sanctions. Those based overseas still have the ability to reach Japanese users but identifying them presents new legal challenges for the publishers. That\u2019s also the case when sites are administered from Japan but utilize international infrastructure.<\/p>\n

As a result, cross-border investigations and accompanying jurisdiction issues are now common in piracy cases. Thousands of pirate sites use the services of American companies, so whether they have connections to Cloudflare or process payments in the U.S., the risk of the publishers seeking assistance from local courts is now high, as the successful prosecution<\/a> of MangaBank\u2019s operator showed.<\/p>\n

Shueisha Seeks Assistance from U.S. Court<\/h2>\n

Following the playbook deployed in the MangaBank case<\/a>, Shueisha has just filed another ex parte<\/em> application at the same California district court seeking discovery of information for use in a foreign proceeding (28 U.S. Code \u00a7 1782<\/a>). <\/p>\n

Shueisha is investigating several manga piracy sites, listed in the application as follows: <\/p>\n

mangagohan.com, mangapro.top, gokumanga.com, doki1001.com, manga1001.in, comick.top<\/em><\/p>\n

The publisher\u2019s legal team says that the sites published infringing copies of Shueisha\u2019s copyrighted works soon after commercial release, adding that this constitutes infringement under both Japanese and Vietnamese laws.<\/p>\n

The reference to Vietnam is based on information provided by Cloudflare. Shueisha previously obtained a DMCA subpoena requiring the CDN company to hand over the personal details of those being the sites. The disclosed information doesn\u2019t identify individuals but does link them to IP addresses belonging to a pair of telecoms companies \u2013 \u2018Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group\u2019 and \u2018Vietname Telecom National\u2019. <\/p>\n

Vietnam doesn\u2019t allow third-party companies to obtain internet users\u2019 identifying information based on copyright infringement allegations so Shueisha\u2019s plan is to act on other information provided by Cloudflare. PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, Google, Braintree and\/or Stripe accounts are linked to the site operators and since the companies are based in the United States, Shueisha wants them to hand over whatever they hold.<\/p>\n

The endgame is to file lawsuits against the site operators in Japan or Vietnam, presumably on copyright infringement grounds, and Shueisha says that courts in both countries would appreciate assistance from the United States. There\u2019s no explanation of why these sites are of particular interest to the publisher out of the hundreds online, but potential clues in the application open up interesting avenues of research.<\/p>\n

Does Investigation Encompass Many More Sites?<\/h2>\n

Studying the domains reveals that they all target consumers of pirated manga in Japan, with no less than 88% and as many as 94% of their visitors coming from the country. Another interesting aspect is that traffic to the sites is either trending downwards (in some cases off the edge of a cliff) or behaving in unnatural ways.<\/p>\n

For example, mangagohan.com enjoyed around 1.9m visits in May, the same in June, but less than half that in July. From 1.6m visits in May, visits to mangapro.top suddenly jumped to 3.6m in June before dropping to 2.4m in July. Visits to gokumanga.com in May topped out at around 2m but traffic was less than a quarter of that in July.<\/p>\n

The other sites show similarly strange patterns, but doki1001.com stands out as a particularly big mover. In May it had around 13.1m visits according to SimilarWeb stats, versus just 1.7m in July, so what lies behind these wild fluctuations?<\/p>\n

Redirections and Connections<\/h2>\n

According to Shueisha, both mangagohan.com and gokumanga.com redirected themselves to mangagohan.me at some point, but that site\u2019s traffic has gone down instead of up in recent months. <\/p>\n

However, scratch just below the surface looking for other redirects and a whole new world of potential links appears between the domains in the application and many others, some of which Shueisha is already investigating.<\/p>\n

\u2013 Mangagohan.com (down): Outbound redirect: mangagohan.me<\/em> (down)
\n\u2013 Gokumanga.com (down): Outbound redirect: mangagohan.me<\/em> (down)<\/p>\n

\u2013 Mangapro.top (down): Inbound redirects: comick.to, mymangaraw.com, mixmanga.com, 3xmanga.com, upmanga.com, picmanga.com, overmanga.com, padmanga.com, loadmanga.com, mangaair.com, mangatweet.com, mangamenu.com, mangano1.com, mangarip.com.<\/em> Oubound redirect: comick.top<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2013 Doki1001.com (down): Inbound redirect: manga-1001.com<\/em> (existing Shueisha target<\/a>)
\n\u2013 Manga1001.in (up) \u2013 Outbound redirect: manga9.co<\/em> (zero traffic in May, 6.4m July)<\/p>\n

\u2013 Comick.top \u2013 (up) \u2013 Inbound redirects: padmanga.com, mangano1.com, mangapro.top, mangamenu.com, mangarank.com, mangaair.com, mangatweet.com, mangarip.com, manga1001.top, loadmanga.com. <\/em>Outbound redirect: mangapro.top<\/em><\/p>\n

The limited domain information above suggests that if the U.S. companies provide useful, actionable material to Shueisha, a gateway to even bigger things may lie ahead. Most obviously, there may be an opportunity to eliminate many pirate sites, for beyond the handful listed in the application.<\/p>\n

Shueisha\u2019s application for discovery can be found here<\/a> (pdf)<\/em><\/p>\n

From: TF<\/a>, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.<\/p>\n

Powered by WPeMatico<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In recent years, publishers of Japanese manga comics have been sending a sustained and clear message that content piracy will not be tolerated, wherever it takes place in the world. The problems faced by companies including Shueisha, Kadowaka, Kodansha, and Shogakukan, are easy to describe but much more difficult to counter. Japan-based pirate site operators […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66580,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[308],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-torrent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66579\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/66580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}