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Japanese manga artist Maki Murakami has gone to court in the United States after several pirate sites published her work without permission. Among the platforms is NyaHentai, a large pirate service with around 24 million visits per month, making it the 75th most visited site in Japan. Murakami’s legal team is trying to find out who runs this platform and several others.
While pirate sites offering mainstream movies and TV shows regularly attract millions of visits every month, just a few years ago it would have been unthinkable that those operating in niches could be ranked in the same way. .
These days, however, sites featuring Japanese comics and anime are immensely popular with an ever-growing audience in the West, making some manga and anime sites just as popular as their “bigger” content counterparts. public”.
NyaHentai.com – One of the great players
NyaHentai.com is a particularly popular platform. Specializing in the ‘hentai’ genre (adult content with often extraordinary themes), the site has built up a huge audience which, according to SimilarWeb statistics, currently exceeds 24 million visits per month.
Indeed, NyaHentai is so popular that it is currently the 75th most popular site in Japan, period, and that hasn’t gone unnoticed by copyright holders. At the time of writing, Google reports that over 7,260 copyright owners have filed complaints seeking the removal of over 3 million URLs from search results.
Although only 53% of them resulted in a URL deletion, this still represents around 1.6 million URLs deleted. Of course, the site continues to operate, but there is at least one part that is trying to get closer to its operators.
Complaints filed with Cloudflare
In late December, Japanese manga artist Maki Murakami filed DMCA complaints with Cloudflare, alleging that a number of pirate sites violated his copyrights. The complaints related to 39 URLs, 8 of which were listed against the nyahentai.com domain and the rest against several other allegedly infringing platforms.
“We represent Maki Murakami, a resident of Japan and the author of the copyrighted works…” the complaint begins.
“It has recently come to the attention of our customers that some users of your services have illegally posted and published certain content on their websites. […]. We request that you immediately disable access to the infringing work and cease all use, reproduction, and distribution of the original work,” the complaint adds to Cloudflare.
This week’s tests reveal that some of the works have indeed been removed, including all titles listed on NyaHentai. However, it looks like Murakami’s legal team intends to take things a step further.
DMCA subpoena seeks identities of operators
Following the DMCA complaint to Cloudflare, the artist’s legal team filed a request for a DMCA subpoena. It seeks to compel Cloudflare to hand over information that could help identify the operator(s) of NyaHentai, presumably to enable further legal action. The information sought is complete.
[I]including, but not limited to, billing or administrative records that prove the following information used by each of the violators, along with timestamps, from the time of user registration and when each infringing works has been uploaded by the infringers to their websites: names); last known address(es); last known telephone and/or mobile phone number(s); any email address(es); account number(s); billing information (including, but not limited to, names, phone numbers, and mailing and billing addresses for each of the payment methods (including, but not limited to, credit cards , bank accounts and any online payment system) ); hosting provider(s); waiters); any other contact information; and all IP address(es) logs.
Same information requested on other sites
In addition to nyahentai.com, the DMCA subpoena to Cloudflare also requires the service to submit the same information for several other sites.
Erocool.net is the most popular with around 1.67 million visits per month, followed closely by ahentai.top with 1.6 million. The remaining pair (hentaidock.com and doghentai.com) have much lower traffic levels, with around 250,000 to 300,000 visits per month each.
What happens next is open to question. Although Cloudflare can sometimes transmit useful user information, it is common for website operators to use its services after submitting fake registration details. This can hamper investigations but, on occasion, useful information can be recovered.
It’s unclear if this has anything to do with doghentai.com currently down.
The DMCA Complaint and DMCA Subpoena can be found here and here (pdf)
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