From The Japan Times:
The Tokyo District Court on Thursday ordered the operator of a now-defunct manga piracy website to pay ¥1.7 billion in compensation to three major Japanese publishers.
Presiding Judge Masaki Sugiura recognized that the site operator and his associates had uploaded the manga for people to read for free, without approval from the publishers, thereby inflicting financial damage.
The plaintiffs — Kadokawa, Shueisha and Shogakukan — said the ¥1.7 billion sum was most likely the highest ever granted by the court among other similar cases, and they hoped the lawsuit would help deter other manga piracy site operators from uploading content illegally.
They originally sought ¥1.9 billion from piracy website Manga-Mura, which was shut down in 2018 after a criminal investigation for violating copyright law. The damages were calculated by multiplying the average number of views by the sales price of the claimed work.
Shueisha executive Atsushi Ito welcomed the ruling. “We will continue to take every possible measure to protect (authors’) works by enforcing their rights not only in Japan but also in other countries where serious damage is still occurring,” he said.
Ito added that eradicating piracy remains difficult. One issue is domain-hopping, where operators can change domain names every two weeks or a month, to avoid anti-piracy measures in place for specific domains, he said.
Eliminating piracy sites where the operators are based overseas is another challenge. “It’s quite challenging for foreign authorities to act in the interest of Japanese companies,” he said.
In addition, many works are translated into English, with the Authorized Books of Japan (ABJ), which monitors illegal digital publications, identifying 1,207 such piracy sites.
According to the ABJ, 10 major English-language manga piracy sites have been accessed around 500 million times.
He also said that the creative works are being translated into other languages. Translations into Vietnamese make up the largest share of pirated content after English.
Link to the rest at The Japan Times and thanks to C. for the tip.