Chinese Herald News Japan's three major manga magazine publishers - Shueisha (Shueisha), Kadokawa Shokawa (Kadokawa) and Shogakukan (Shogakukan) jointly filed a lawsuit against the pirate website "Manga Village" (closed), claiming a total of about 1.9 billion yen from the original operator of the website for its economic losses caused by its illegal publication of comics. On April 18, 2024, the presiding judge of the Tokyo District Court, Masaki Sugiura, issued a judgment in the case, ordering the defendant to pay a total of about 1.7 billion yen to the three publishing houses.
According to the indictment, Manga Village, Japan's largest piracy website, which was opened around February 2016 and closed in April 2018, had about 537 million visits.
In terms of publishers, the amount of loss is calculated based on the average number of views of each work based on the average number of views of each work based on the number of visits, including "KERORO Guncao" and "King of the World", which were released by three publishing houses. The amount of damage claimed by Shogakukan is about 1 billion yen, and Kadokawa and Shueisha are about 400 million yen each.
It is reported that the website "Manga Village", which made the Japanese government helpless, was removed from the shelves by Google directly searching for the list of works at that time, and the operator had to take the initiative to shut down the website. Before the closure of Manga Village, it was the largest pirated manga website in Japan, with 100 million monthly active users, even surpassing Livedoor.
In 2018, after the "Manga Village" was destroyed by the police, operator Misumi Hoshino (29) was arrested in the Philippines on July 8, 2019. The comics site, which was registered in 2016, had 98.92 million monthly users in two years, and publishers and cartoonists of all kinds suffered. However, the lawsuit is against one of Japan's largest manga piracy sites, but it is only a scratch in the bucket for manga piracy, as there are more than 1,000 sites that offer copyrighted content at any given time.
It is worth continuing to think about the protection of intellectual property rights, and Japan was once a pond flower. Why is it that comic fans in other countries have stumbled on genuine comics, but the Japanese comic industry has made a pirated website bigger and stronger? Why is it that no formal organization is willing to shoulder the responsibility and become the Netflix of the comics industry?
According to reports, with the popularity of the Internet and smartphones, the publication of paper books is becoming less and less effective, and Japanese netizens also said that "there are fewer and fewer people who are willing to buy physical books now".
According to statistics compiled by the National Publishers Association of Japan, the sales of manga in Japan in 2016 were 194.7 billion, a decrease of 7.4% from the previous year, and the sales of manga magazines were 101.6 billion, a decrease of 12.9%. On the other hand, the number of e-comics increased by 27.1%, and the number of users who read comics on mobile phones increased by 51%. In 2017, sales of single-line e-comic books in Japan surpassed those of paper editions for the first time.
In such an environment, there is no website in Japan where it is legal, convenient, and convenient to read all genuine works at once! Japanese manga fans can only read the "electronic version" that has been published in paper manga on online reading platforms such as Shueisha's "Shonen JUMP+", Kodansha's "Mangazine Pocket", and Shogakukan's "MangaONE". The decline of paper comics, and the lack of a large and rich genuine digital reading platform to "continue life", in addition to leaving room for pirated websites, the impact on the comics industry is also huge.