Cloudflare Ordered to Pay Millions in Damages to Japanese Publishers

The Tokyo District Court’s decision in the Cloudflare case has drawn worldwide attention. According to the ruling, the American company was held responsible for facilitating access to websites that distribute manga illegally, resulting in a multimillion-yen payment to Japanese publishers.

Cloudflare Ordered to Pay Millions in Damages to Japanese Publishers

Cloudflare became the center of discussion after four of Japan’s biggest publishers — Shueisha, Kadokawa, Kodansha, and Shogakukan — jointly filed a lawsuit in 2022. They argued that the company indirectly helped spread pirated manga by providing services that allowed illegal websites to operate more efficiently.

The court ruled that Cloudflare must pay around 500 million yen (approximately 3.2 million USD) in compensation, a value corresponding to losses caused by the massive access to pirated material between April 2020 and December 2021. According to the publishers, between 70 million and 2 billion chapters were illegally accessed per month on platforms using the company’s services.

Although Cloudflare does not operate piracy websites, the publishers argued that it contributed to the issue by offering its CDN technology, which copies cached data from the original server and distributes it from servers closer to the user. This reduced traffic and made it easier for Japanese readers to access sites hosted outside the country.

The accusation claimed that Cloudflare continued providing services to clearly infringing websites even after being notified of the violations, making it partially responsible for the damages.

The defense argued that the company merely transmits data passively, placing responsibility on the operators of the illegal sites. However, according to Japanese media, the court understood that, in this specific case, copying protected content significantly harmed the interests of copyright holders — fitting into an exception defined by Japanese law.

Thus, after more than three and a half years of legal proceedings, the decision favored the publishers. The case may now influence future disputes involving tech platforms and content piracy, setting an important precedent for the industry.