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The long arm of the Japanese publisher Shueisha’s manga law reaches Shanghai.
On Tuesday, Shueisha, the Japanese manga anthology publisher Shonen Weekly Jump and crush hit titles like One piece and Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, issued a statement saying that had been convicted in the trial of a man accused of illegally uploading the Shueisha manga to a website he administered. The man received a suspended prison sentence and will have to pay a large fine.
Given the traditional lack of tolerance of the Japanese legal system to hack entertainment media, this usually doesn’t seem so surprising. However, what makes this situation unique is that the court case took place in China, a country that tends to have a much more lenient attitude towards the concepts of trademark and copyright.
The trial in Shanghai Xuhui District People’s Court, which ended last Friday, ended the legal fight against the administrator of the site that the Shanghai police arrested on October 30. According to investigators, since about 2013 the man had been running an illegally uploaded manga website, mainly titles published by Shueisha, with Chinese translations to the website, which published them even before the corresponding chapter numbers of Shonen Weekly Jump went on sale in Japan. Shueisha claims that the site, which also hosted paid advertising, had some 400,000 unique users and caused significant harm to the company and its authors.
The man admitted the charges, and after his conviction he was given a three-year prison sentence suspended (effectively a form of probation) and ordered to pay a fine of 80,000 yuan (US $ 11,300). He wrote too a letter of apology to the editor, a part of which reads “During my time in prison, I have been reflecting on the error of my ways, and I sincerely regret my actions … I deeply apologize for the harmful effects of my offense.”
In addition to the completed criminal case, Shueisha also files civil court charges against the man., and in his announcement of the court ruling he also promised:
“To fulfill our obligation as publisher to protect the works in which its creators have put their hearts and souls, Shueisha will continue to take a firm stand against harm to our creators, both within Japan and abroad, working with researchers and civil organizations. . “
The Shanghai conviction is the latest chapter in Japanese publishers’ expanding fight against piracy abroad, following the forced repatriation of a wanted pirate from the Philippines to Japan (where the authorities wasted no time and arrested him so soon. as his plane entered Japanese airspace), and a multi-publisher lawsuit against pirate sites filed in New York last fall.
Source: Shueisha via Animation Business Journal via Anime News Network / Rafael Antonio Pineda
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