Tokyo: A Tokyo district court has ordered Cloudflar e to pay 500 million yen (about 3.2 million US dollars) in damages to four major Japanese publishing houses after finding the US company liable for hosting servers used by manga piracy platforms. The judgment follows years of concern within Japan’s publishing industry over the financial impact of pirated manga circulating online.

The case was filed in 2022 by Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan and Kadokawa, which argued that Cloudflare provided support to platforms distributing unauthorised copies of more than 4,000 manga titles. The publishers said these sites drew roughly 300 million views each month, leading to substantial revenue losses.

In a joint statement, the publishers said the court’s decision was significant. Industry groups ha

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