Manga publishing giants Shogakukan, Shueisha, Kadokawa and Kodansha have a new batch of pirate sites in their collective crosshairs. In one action they have asked a US court to help them obtain the identities of several ‘pirate’ operators pulling in a few million visits per month. In another, just two domains are pulling in a staggering 290 million visits per month.

As we have reported on many occasions in recent years, the lowly DMCA subpoena can be a powerful tool to discover the identities of those running pirate sites.

Cheap to file in court and rarely given much scrutiny, DMCA subpoenas are regularly served on third-party service providers such as Cloudflare and domain registries, requiring them to hand over customer data.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect, however, is how these pieces of paper often act as an early warning signal of much bigger things down the line.

The rest of this article can be read on TorrentFreak.com

Source link