Major Japanese manga publishers requested assistance from a US court this week. The companies say that information held by financial and tech companies will help them file lawsuits against the operators of seven pirate sites, some with ‘Mangaraw’ branding. After previously using Cloudflare’s services, some of the sites are now operating openly from Russia.

Over the past few years, rightsholders in Japan have shown new urgency in their fight against piracy. Strict laws on home soil mean that overseas pirate sites pose the biggest threat and with that, new sets of challenges.

The successful prosecution of Mangabank’s operator in China this summer was preceded by an ex parte application designed to reveal his identity. At a district court in California, the publishers requested an order requiring Google and others to hand over relevant information for subsequent use in a foreign proceeding (28 U.S. Code § 1782).

In August 2022, Shueisha filed a similar ex parte application at the same California court, hoping to identify the operators of mangagohan.com, mangapro.top, gokumanga.com, doki1001.com, manga1001.in, and comick.top. The company said that its goal was to file lawsuits against defendants in Vietnam or possibly Japan, depending on the information received.

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