Manga publishing giants Shueisha & VIZ Media are preparing legal action against two large manga piracy platforms. The primary target is Manganato.com, a massive site pulling in 167 million visits per month, more than The Pirate Bay and Fmovies combined. The second target, Manganelo.com, is a comparatively smaller player with ‘just’ 24 million visits per month.

No longer the sole preserve of Japanese consumers, manga publications (comics/graphic novels) now have global reach and massive commercial potential, but that hasn’t always been the case.

Granting broad access to manga titles, especially publications translated into English, was not a key priority for publishers until a few years ago. In the meantime, unofficial ‘scanlation’ groups stepped in to meet demand with their scanned and translated copies, leaving official suppliers to play catch-up and pirate sites to reap the benefits.

As a result, companies including Tokyo-based publisher Shueisha and US-based publisher VIZ Media now have a big piracy problem. Manga piracy sites are now some of the largest pirate sites, period, in part because they were allowed to gain traction but also due to them being free and easy to access. But if the publishers have their way, that won’t always be the case.

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

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