Image from Reuters via The Japan Times
Recently, we mentioned that CloudFlare confirmed the outage wasn’t caused by a cyberattack. Now, four Japanese publishing companies, including Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan and Kadokawa, sued internet service provider Cloudflare. So, what should you know about it?
CloudFlare caused significant losses for the Japanese publishers
For your information, CloudFlare was sued in 2022 for hosting pirated content for a number of websites, causing significant losses to the companies. According to the lawsuit filed, Cloudflare hosted content and provided access to over 4000 manga comic titles to two large piracy websites with approximately 300 million views per month.
After three years, the judge in the case, Aya Takahashi, reportedly ordered Cloudflare to pay a 500 million yen (~RM13.2 million) fine to the four companies as compensation for hosting the pirated manga content. The judge said that although Cloudflare was not guilty of uploading the pirated content to their US-based server machines, their services were used by these pirated websites to upload the content arbitrarily.
CloudFlare did nothing to stop the issue
Moreover, Cloudflare allegedly knew that these websites were uploading pirated content, but did nothing to curb the issue, and therefore, these companies had no choice but to sue Cloudflare. In 2019, these companies reportedly reached an agreement for Cloudflare to no longer host pirated websites.
However, it is still seen to be rampant, and because of this, lawsuit proceedings against Cloudflare have been initiated. Cloudflare will also reportedly file an appeal against the decision made by the Tokyo court.
Stay tuned to TechNave.com for more updates.
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