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MANGA Plus Invites Users to Confess Piracy & Name Most-Used Pirate SitesAndy Maxwell, 21 Jun 10:46 AM For many years Japanese manga companies had a

MANGA Plus Invites Users to Confess Piracy & Name Most-Used Pirate Sites Andy Maxwell, 21 Jun 10:46 AM For many years Japanese manga companies had a tendency to ignore the majority of overseas markets, despite the potential for lucrative trade. However, powered by a global Internet and passionate fans with translation abilities, scanned copies of manga titles first trickled and then flooded into the West, creating a massive market and future demand for this Japanese cultural product where none previously existed. Manga pirates often take credit for what amounted to a highly successful unpaid marketing project but having seen the potential, manga publishers understandably want this market for themselves. In more recent years, great strides have been made toward giving manga fans outside Japan improved legal options but pirate sites still exist and publishers now want them gone. Legal Action by Publisher Shueisha Ever since an investigation was revealed into the former operator of manga piracy giant Mangamura, publisher Shueisha has been closely connected to an increasing number of large piracy investigations. From the disappearance of Mangastream in 2019 to the shutdown of Mangabank in 2021, Shueisha (along with anti-piracy partners Shogakukan, Kadokawa and Kodansha) have rarely been far from the action. They're currently investigating several huge platforms and are even suing Cloudflare for 'helping' pirate sites. Massive pirate platform Manganato is also under pressure. Competing With Piracy In January 2019, Shueisha launched direct publishing platform MANGA Plus with accompanying mobile apps. It's proven popular with fans for the range of free content in multiple languages but for a number of reasons it fails to compete with pirate sites. For example, readers of many series are met with a message stating, Our current license prohibits us from publishing the in-between chapters, a problem pirate sites never face. These types of issues aren't insurmountable long term but in the short term, pirate sites obviously prove attractive. Need Sensitive Information From Users? Just Ask Them For It To get a better idea of what customers want from MANGA Plus, the company is running a survey asking questions about the languages read most on the service, quality of translations, potential purchasing habits (including volume and preference for in-app currencies), how much users would pay to bridge the "missing chapters" issue, and which new comics users would like to see on MANGA Plus. These are obviously solid questions for improving customer experience, overall satisfaction, and for gauging what people are prepared to pay to get the features they want. But of course, Shueisha's manga business is challenged by illegal pirate alternatives, something the company doesn't even try to hide. Confess Here Please As early as question four in the survey, Shueisha invites users of its MANGA Plus service to admit to copyright infringement, with question five asking them to name the pirate site they use often (or occasionally) to break the law. There are two ways of looking at these questions, with the less cynical suggesting that Shueisha simply wants to look at these platforms and work out what it can do to be more like them, whether that relates to the speed of release, the sheer volume of content, functionality, and/or familiarity. Indeed, question six does just that. Question eight directly asks how MANGAPlus can be improved, again with an emphasis on piracy. Options include update speed compared to pirate sites, catalog size, language support and the number of works available for free. It even acknowledges that users of MANGA Plus may have heard about Shueisha's legal service on a pirate site. Should People Be Confessing to Piracy? Text on the app and on the website variant of the survey differ slightly, with the app version offering assurance as follows: "Your survey responses will just be used to help us make future decisions regarding Manga PLUS, so please feel free to answer honestly." Of course, running a survey like this on a platform used by manga fans makes absolute sense since answers are provided by active users in the best position to offer advice. That said, users of MANGA Plus putting themselves into a database of known piracy users, controlled by a company that has a reputation for cracking down on piracy, might not be the best idea – at least according to any lawyer. Personal Data Like most companies, Shueisha collects personal data including identification code[s] and location data unique to each mobile device, browsing history, plus email addresses or account IDs where relevant. These are retained for all the usual business reasons including "prevention or taking measures of wrongful act." Data collected from users can also be shared with Shueisha group members including VIZ Media, also known for its anti-piracy activities. Shueisha also reserves the right to hand over information to third parties in cases based on "laws and regulations including inquiry pursuant to Criminal Procedure Law." In the end, users will do what they feel is most appropriate but there are plenty of reports online of users being happy to hand over the requested information. In particular, people seem happy to list the pirate sites they like the most, which of course will not influence Shueisha in any way when it decides its next list of pirate sites to take down. The interesting angle here is that at least today, Shueisha sees pirate sites as competition, as entities to keep up with, emulate, and ultimately beat. The big question is whether innovation will continue if it succeeds in taking most of them down, or whether it will use the data on how much people are prepared to pay to capitalize on its new market. From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more. Judge Recommends $150k Piracy Judgment Against Torrent Site Operator Ernesto Van der Sar, 20 Jun 10:43 PM Up until a few years ago, MKVCage was a popular torrent portal that also uploaded its torrents on other sites. This ended abruptly when the makers of the superhero film "Hellboy" took the site's operator to court the summer of 2019. Movie company "HB Productions" accused the site and its Pakistani operator Muhammad Faizan of promoting and distributing pirated copies of the movie, hoping that this would put an end to the activity. And indeed it did. The lawsuit had an almost immediate effect as the torrent site became unreachable soon after the case went public. At the same time, MKVCage stopped pushing torrents to other sites as well. This meant that part of the plan had succeeded but HB Productions also wanted financial compensation. Damages and Jurisdiction Battle Since Faizan didn't show up in court, the movie company's attorney Kerry Culpepper requested a default judgment. Initially, the filmmakers asked for $270,000 in copyright infringement damages. This figure was based on the number of alleged infringements multiplied by the Blu-ray retail price. The court wasn't convinced by this calculation and the film company later changed its request to $150,000, which is the maximum statutory copyright infringement damages for a single work. Despite this change, Judge Mansfield still wasn't satisfied. He questioned whether the defendant, who didn't put up a defense, could actually be sued in America. In 2020, the default judgment was denied based on the argument that a US court doesn't have jurisdiction over the Pakistani defendant. The filmmakers were not happy with this outcome and filed an amended complaint, hoping to fix the shortcomings in their allegations. Initially, this renewed effort appeared to fail as Judge Mansfield still found the provided evidence insufficient. Last month, however, US District Court Judge John Michael Seabright reached a different conclusion. According to the court, the Internet has transformed how foreign defendants interact with the United States. In this case, the defendant used US-based servers from a remote location, which is sufficient to invoke liability. Judge Recommends $150,000 Damages With this ruling in hand, the case was sent back to the Magistrate Judge who now recommends granting the $150,000 default judgment because all factors weigh in favor of the filmmakers. This includes the alleged damages, which are substantial. "The Court finds that the amount of money at stake is significant relative to the cost of continued litigation, especially considering Defendant's location outside of the United States and Plaintiff's alleged actual damages totaling $270,902.58. "The statutory damages Plaintiff seeks are appropriate and reflect the severity of Defendant's willful infringement of Plaintiff's copyrighted Work," Judge Mansfield adds. This means that a default judgment against the MKVCage operator is warranted but a separate evaluation of the scale of the damages is still required. Here, Judge Mansfield also agrees that the maximum statutory damages award is appropriate. These damages are meant to compensate the filmmakers, but also to punish the defendant. Willful Copyright Infringement The Judge agrees that the infringements were willful. Among other things, the site operator initially relocated the site to a new domain when the lawsuit was filed. "When Defendant received notification of this lawsuit, Defendant created a new website, 'mkvcage.nl,' hosted by a completely different servicer […] so that Defendant could continue his infringing activities." All in all, this means that awarding $150,000 in statutory damages is appropriate. "The Court finds that awarding maximum statutory damages under the Copyright Act is appropriate to deter and punish Defendant's conduct and to compensate Plaintiff," Judge Manfield adds. There's also a small disappointment in the recommendations as not all of the requested costs and fees were granted. Nevertheless, the proposed $150,000 damages award is still a big win. This means that, after repeated back-and-forths, the film company can get most of what it asked for. The court still has to adopt the recommendations from the Magistrate Judge, but the biggest hurdles have been taken. — A copy of the full findings and recommendations, issued by Magistrate Judge Manfield, is available here (pdf) From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more. ©2022 TorrentFreak | Office 21338 PO Box 4336 Manchester, North West M61 0BW United Kingdom Web Version   Preferences   Forward   Unsubscribe     Powered by Mad Mimi®A GoDaddy® company