Overview
- The Tokyo District Court, presided over by Judge Aya Takahashi, ordered Cloudflare to pay about ¥500 million to Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan, and KADOKAWA.
- At issue was whether Cloudflare’s content-delivery caching qualified for a legal exception or constituted conduct that unjustly harmed rights holders under Japan’s copyright law.
- The publishers alleged Cloudflare’s servers distributed pirated data for series including Attack on Titan and ONE PIECE, drawing an estimated 70 million to 2 billion views per month between April 2020 and December 2021.
- The companies said they warned Cloudflare in 2020 to stop providing CDN services to the pirate sites and filed suit in February 2022 after distribution continued.
- Cloudflare argued it only passively transmitted data and that site operators were responsible, but the court accepted the publishers’ claims in this case.