Manga publishers are trying to stop the growth of piracy websites. It is not being easy at all, but three large publishers have agreed to a historic lawsuit against mangamuraone of the main pages where manga could be read illegally.
pirate hunt
mangamura It opened its doors in 2016 and since then it has become one of the main pages to read pirated manga. Between September 2017 and February 2018 alone, the website received more than 620 million visitors, and the numbers have continued to grow ever since.
publishers Shueisha, Kodakawa and Shogakukan have sued the website for 1.9 billion yenwhich translates into just over 14 million euros.
To calculate this figure, it has been calculated how much damage the web has done to the sales of seventeen manga series, including ‘one piece‘, ‘Overlord, ‘Kengan Ashura’ , ‘The Rising of the Shield Hero’ and ‘Dorohedoro‘. Mangamura’s creator is a young man known as Hoshino and that he was residing in the Philippines until 2019, when the country’s Immigration Department detained him and handed him over to Japanese authorities.
Hoshino was accused of copyright infringement in June 2021 and fined 10 million yen and 3 years in prison, in addition to having to return the profits that the website had generated. Ken Akamatsu, the author of ‘Love Hina’, he also sued MM Lab and Global Net, two companies that advertised on Mangamura, which had to pay the mangaka compensation for the drop in sales on his manga that the piracy was deemed to have caused.
Since then, two more Mangmura officials have also been arrested, but neither lawsuits from publishers nor arrests have succeeded in curbing manga piracy, which seems to be on the rise.
“Things are getting even worse. There are more than 700 piracy websites, and the top ten get 240 million hits every month. Mangamura only got about 100 million every month,” said Atsushi, a Shueisha representative.