Mangamura, the large online manga comic sharing website that was closed earlier this year for piracy of copyrighted manga, is now facing deeper scrutiny. Vast records from its online server company (an American company, Cloudflare) have been served up to the Tokyo District Court. The litigating manga artist's lawyer announced this on October 27, 2018.

The manga artist, residing in Tokyo, sued Cloudflare (a major Internet cloud network platform company) for records of access by the administrator of Mangamura to Cloudflare in April. The artist's lawyer explained that Cloudflare gave the litigant records in August. On the basis of this, the actual identity of the secret host of Mangamura was determined. This is a first for Cloudflare to be sued in Japan for information on clients.

Anger that Mangamura was forcibly closed over copyright infringement will probably be compounded by this revelation that the host's personally identifying information was yielded. The suing manga artist might sue the host now, but as pointed out, the market for digitized manga is large yet conventional manga publishers are not catering to it. Punishing the piracy promoters of Mangamura may not lead to long-lasting support for the manga artists of Japan, as noted in an article from May.

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.