Cloudfare has been ordered to pay US$3 million in damages.
In a bid to fight against manga piracy, various Japanese publishers, which includes Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan, and Kadokawa collectively, sued U.S web infrastructure and website security company Cloudfare in 2022. The suit alleged that Cloudfare was hosting servers to support websites involved in the distribution of pirated manga.
One such site, which was unspecified in the original suit, pulled an at-the-time estimated 300 million views a month, with over 4,000 manga titles in its repertoire.
The publishers were reported to seek JPY400 million (then US$3.5million) in combined damages. The suit was filed with the Tokyo District Court.
Japanese publishers celebrate lawsuit win
3 years after the lawsuit against Cloudfare was filed, Kadokawa has unveiled through its official social channels and website that the Tokyo District Court has ruled in their favour.
The joint statement, which was made by their representative executive officer and Kadokawa CEO Takeshi Natsuno, reads in full (through a machine translation):
We are pleased to announce that the Tokyo District Court handed down a judgment on November 19, 2025, recognizing Cloudflare, Inc. (Headquarters: San Francisco, California, USA; hereinafter "Cloudflare") as a copyright infringement lawsuit that we filed jointly with Kodansha Ltd., Shueisha Inc., and Shogakukan Inc. against Cloudflare, Inc. (Headquarters: San Francisco, California, USA; hereinafter "Cloudflare") for damages.
KADOKAWA hopes that this ruling will prevent pirate sites from misusing CDN (Content Delivery Network) services and maintain the content creation cycle in which creators are fairly compensated. As a comprehensive entertainment company involved in publishing, anime, live-action films, games, and more, we will continue to take firm action against copyright infringement, contributing to the protection of copyrights and the further development of creative activity.
The ruling recognised an estimated JPY3.6 billion (or about US$24million) in damages, but since the lawsuit filed claimed that only a portion of the damage was suffered due to Cloudfare’s assistance towards hosting the piracy sites, the company was ordered to pay a total amount of JPY500million (around US$3million).
This isn’t the first time that Cloudfare has gone under fire for playing host to such illegal distribution sites. In 2021, Cloudfare received a subpoena from Shueisha, compelling the company to provide the domains for the manga piracy site Manga Bank. In 2020, Cloudfare faced a similar suit filed by Japanese publisher Takeshobo, alongside an unnamed male manga creator.
In 2019, Cloudfare settled with the same four publishers in the 2022 suit, after which the company agreed to stop caching content on its Japanese servers from specified piracy websites.