TOKYO (Kyodo) -- A Japanese court on Wednesday ordered U.S. cloud service firm Cloudflare to pay about 500 million yen ($3 million) in damages to four major Japanese publishers of popular manga, judging that it helped a piracy site operator infringe on their copyrights.
The Tokyo District Court almost fully met a compensation demand by the publishers of manga titles such as "One Piece" and "Attack on Titan," in what is seen by the plaintiffs as Japan's first judicial decision to hold a company that facilitates transfers of cached digital content liable for damages.
The four are Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan and Kadokawa.
According to the ruling, Cloudflare had a contract with one of the largest illegal sites. It provided a content delivery network service, temporarily duplicating data from piracy site servers and distributing it to large numbers of users.
Presiding Judge Aya Takahashi found that Cloudflare had simplified its identification procedure, enabling the piracy site operator, remaining anonymous, to efficiently distribute pirated copies.
"[Cloudflare] failed in its duty to stop providing the service," the judge said, noting that the company did not suspend it even after the publishing houses had notified it of the copyright infringement.
Cloudflare had argued that it was the website operator that transmitted the data and that it was unaware of the infringement.
The company said it plans to appeal the ruling, warning that letting it stand would seriously affect the efficiency and reliability of the internet.
