Manga comics and magazines are huge. Not just in Japan but all over the world.

People used to read them on paper, but digital is the standard today. While that makes these comics more accessible, they’re also easier to pirate.

For years there has been an active ‘scanlation’ community. These are fan-made translations that are shared online. Sharing can begin innocently, by posting a copy on a message board. However, there are also entire sites dedicated to this practice.

These platforms draw millions of users which is something manga publishers are not happy with. While the pirate sites certainly helped to popularize the genre around the globe, it doesn’t help the creators if fans enjoy everything for free.

Earlier this year publishers already pressed MangaRock to change its business model and go legal, and this week it appears that another major scanlation site has thrown in the towel.

Mangastream, which operated in the open for many years, has completely disappeared now. There is no official statement on the site’s homepage. Instead, it’s displaying a generic “name of resolved” error, which means that the domain’s nameservers have been stripped.

There has been no official announcement from the site’s operators. However, the domain name changes coincide with the removal of Mangastream’s official Twitter account. This makes it very plausible that the ‘disappearance’ is intentional.

The recent events are a blow to many manga fans, especially since Mangastream was the source of many scanlations. While the motivation for the shutdown it remains guesswork, several leads point to the Japanese publisher Shueisha, known for the Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine.

Following in the footsteps of Mangastream, Jaimini’s Box announced that it would stop working on Weekly Shōnen Jump, but not on other series.

“If you haven’t seen it already, Mangastream has decided to stop working on WSJ series overall. The important part is, we think it is a good place for us to end too,” the site announced.

“This is a new beginning, and end, to an era of scanlation,” Jaimini’s Box added, pointing its readers to MANGA Plus, the authorized online manga platform that’s owned by Shueisha.

After digging further into the issue TorrentFreak was able to confirm that Shueisha indeed had its eyes set on Mangastream.

Earlier this year the Japanese publisher requested a DMCA subpoena at a US federal court in Maryland, demanding that Cloudflare should hand over all details it holds on the domain name’s owner.

Shueisha hoped that identifying the operators of the site could help the company to protect its copyrights.

“The purpose for which the subpoena is sought is to obtain the identity of alleged infringers and the information obtained therefrom will only be used for the purpose of protecting rights under the Copyright Act,” the attorney informed the court.

This filing dates back to March and it’s the only DMCA subpoena Shueisha requested. It is unclear whether this effort did indeed result in any useful information, as we don’t see a signed order on the docket, but it does confirm that Mangastream had a target on its back.

Paired with Jaimini’s Box’s decision to stop Weekly Shōnen Jump scanlation, it’s likely that Mangastream’s ‘disappearance’ follows legal pressure from the company.

Whatever the reason may be, many of the site’s users are disappointed. A thread started on Reddit generated hundreds of comments and others took their frustration and dismay to Twitter.

There is no record of a federal lawsuit against Mangastream in the US. However, Shueisha did previously team up with other publishers in a legal battle against the operators of the pirate site Hoshinoromi. That case is ongoing.

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For years, downloading movies and TV shows has been enough for many online pirates but the broad availability of illicit live streaming services is now a huge draw.

No longer limited to watching after-the-fact recorded content, streaming websites and IPTV services now offer packages that compete and even out-do traditional cable and satellite providers, with the added bonus of being delivered at almost pocket-money prices.

While consumers reap the benefits of low costs and a broader choice of content, suppliers of illicit IPTV products are lured by the proposition of making good money. In Europe alone, the market is edging towards an estimated billion euros per year and there is no shortage of people looking for a piece of the pie.

UK-based Steven Underwood was one of those streaming entrepreneurs but in January this year, things came crashing down. Following an investigation by the Federation Against Copyright Theft and Cornwall Trading Standards, the Police Regional Organised Crime Unit entered Underwood’s home with a search warrant.

An investigation revealed that the Redruth man had sold around £400,000 worth of subscriptions to his IPTV service. The platform was never named publicly named but it’s believed to have been in operation for at least two years, supplying illegal streams of Sky, BT, and Premier League content, among others.

It is relatively rare for these types of cases to go to trial and this one was no exception. In November, Underwood appeared before Truro Magistrates Court, pleading guilty to copyright and fraud offenses. All that remained was a hearing to determine his punishment.

At a sentencing hearing yesterday, the Court heard that between December 2016 and January 2019, 34-year-old Underwood admitted communicating a copyrighted work to the public for personal gain, contrary to the Copyright Designs and Patents Act, and further admitted an offense under the Fraud Act 2006.

Prosecutor Harry Ahuja told the Court that Underwood “had specific skills in IT” and used them to obtain illegal streams that were uploaded to remote servers, which cost the Cornwall man between £6,000 and £8,000 a month to maintain.

“You were engaged in a highly profitable piece of completely illegal activity,” Judge Bob Linford told Underwood.

Labeling the crimes as “extremely serious”, the Judge handed Underwood a one-year prison sentence suspended for two years, a 20-day rehabilitation activity requirement (to lessen the likelihood of future offending), and made him the subject of a £10 confiscation order, Falmouth Packet reports.

“We are constantly working to remove sellers of illegal streaming subscriptions from the market and bring them to justice,” said Kieron Sharp, CEO of FACT, commenting on the sentencing.

“The message is clear – if you are tempted to sell access to content that is not licensed or owned by you, you risk facing a criminal conviction.”

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From a standing start in January 2013, file-hosting platform Mega has gone from strength to strength.

Founded by Kim Dotcom in response to the Megaupload takedown of 2012, Mega has since parted ways with the entrepreneur but its growth has continued in his wake.

According to figures published by Mega, at the end of the final quarter of 2013 the cloud storage company was hosting around 0.6 billion files. In 2014, that had leaped to 3.6 billion files, a figure that almost doubled to 11.9 billion by the end of 2015. The latest published data reveals that at the end of September 2019, Mega was storing an impressive 63.8 billion files.

Early 2015 the company published its first transparency report, a common practice for large technology companies including Google, Twitter and Reddit. The latest installment published today by Mega strives to underline the platform’s compliance with local and international law and has a clear emphasis on how it deals with copyright infringement.

With an obvious eye on the fate of Kim Dotcom and the ongoing Megaupload saga, Mega stresses that it enjoys safe harbor protections under New Zealand’s Copyright Act in respect of content uploaded by its users. Additionally, while there is no technical need for it to do so, the company says that it also respects the standards required to achieve safe harbor under the DMCA and the EU Copyright Directive.

As a result, Mega reports that when it receives a takedown notice it aims to disable access to content within four hours, with takedowns “usually being actioned” well within that self-imposed limit. However, with files reportedly being uploaded at the rate of 500 per second, there are bound to be some that breach copyright law.

For the first nine months of 2019, Mega reports that it processed around 317,500 takedown requests. As the table below shows, that is a relatively small number when viewed alongside the total number of files stored by the company.

Data provided by Mega shows that the number of links taken down peaked in 2014 at around 150,000, with a downward trend following until late 2015. Since then, takedowns have varied from a low of around 50,000 in the third quarter of 2018 to a high of 120,000 in the second quarter of 2019.

However, as the table below shows, the relatively steep rises seen this year had very little impact on the trend of reducing takedowns when compared to the percentage of files stored overall.

In light of the ongoing lawsuits in the United States, particularly involving ISP Cox Communications, the manner in which technology companies handle the issue of so-called “repeat infringers” is now a key battleground when questions are raised over liability for infringement. In this regard, it’s clear that Mega doesn’t want to be seen falling short.

After initially operating a “five strikes” policy, in 2015 Mega introduced a “three strikes” regime that remains in place today. Related account suspensions peaked in the third quarter of 2017 at just over 8,000 but then suddenly tailed off to a relatively steady 2,000 to 2,500 suspensions per quarter thereafter.

Since its inception, Mega says it has suspended around 78,000 accounts for hitting the limits of its repeat infringer policy, which is a significant number but relatively small when compared to the number of user accounts overall.

Mega launched as “The Privacy Company” with file encryption a key selling point. The cloud storage platform says that it cannot decrypt any files without the appropriate key but “does have access to registration information and IP addresses used to access our services.”

The company adds that it holds personal data relating to users for extended periods, including email and IP addresses, plus “limited activity detail” relating to account access, file uploads, shares, and chats.

“Personal data is retained indefinitely while the user’s account is open. After account closure, Mega will retain all account information as long as there is any law enforcement request pending but otherwise for 12 months after account closure as users sometimes request that an account be re-activated,” Mega states.

“After 12 months, identifying information such as email and IP addresses will be anonymized (except that email address records will be retained for reference by the user’s contacts or where the user has participated in chats with other Mega users) but other related database records may be retained.”

This information will only be handed over when Mega is required to do so by New Zealand law, a New Zealand court, or law enforcement authority “with appropriate jurisdiction”. However, the company notes that it may “consider” requests from overseas law enforcement and civil claimants.

“During the 2018-2019 year, Mega was served 7 legal orders from NZ authorities and then disclosed account information for 540 user accounts which are alleged to be involved in serious criminal activity overseas,” the company concludes.

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The phrase declaring that there is “nothing new under the sun” is well known.

At least in part, it suggests that everything we say, do, or create is copied from the people or material we learn from, after being processed through the intricacies of our own experiences.

This ‘human remix’ theory is the premise of a new documentary series produced by Copy-Me.org, a group that was featured on the main page of The Pirate Bay back in 2013. Titled the Creativity Delusion, the latest installment in the series declares that “Geniuses Steal.”

“We know geniuses are not real and minds don’t have Eureka moments. But we still cling to the idea of an original artist. That romantic notion of someone who creates something out of nothing, with their mind alone,” the introduction reads.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Copy-Me’s Alex Lungu further explains that the episode focuses on the rarity of originality in history, art, and inventions.

“From Morse to Beethoven, from Shakespeare to Orwell, from Lynch to Tarkovsky, everything is a constant remix,” Lungu says.

“It makes us feel good to believe in a somewhat supernatural idea of a creator. But I think it’s much more liberating for anyone who makes anything to not put so much pressure on themselves, as it’s too much already. And yeah, one of the biggest downsides is that we lock our culture up believing that this will somehow lead to more creativity, not less.”

In common with any good documentary, The Creativity Delusion: Geniuses Steal goes into detail, providing clear examples of well-known quotes, pieces of art, film scenes, musical compositions and more, that were either copied from pre-existing works or provided inspiration for new creations.

Unfortunately, uploading such a documentary to YouTube is a risky endeavor, since the platform’s automatic ContentID system has no way to determine whether a piece of content had been truly pirated or should be subject to fair use exemptions.

As a result, after the documentary was uploaded on December 8, 2019, it was immediately targeted by YouTube’s bots. They determined that highlighting the similarities between well-known tracks, such as the Robin Thicke/Pharrell Williams track Blurred Lines and Marvin Gaye’s Got to Give it Up, with appropriate short samples, are an infringement of the labels’ copyrights.

This resulted in the documentary being subjected to not just one but four separate ContentID matches.

Copy-Me disputed all of the claims but fast forward ten days and the hits against the video remain in place and look to remain so for another three weeks. The disputes are reportedly “under review” but in the meantime, the entities behind these tracks get the benefit of the doubt that their content is being used illegally.

While the documentary highlights many clear instances of artists copying or basing their work on those of others, the fact that the section focusing on Blurred Lines seems to have caused the most issues is ironic, to say the least.

After a long legal battle that finally came to a close in 2018, a judge ruled that Thicke and Pharrell must pay $5m to the family of Marvin Gaye for copyright infringement because Blurred Lines bore too many similarities to Got to Give it Up.

Interestingly, just after that case went to an unsuccessful appeal, more than 200 musicians filed an amicus curiae brief in support of Thicke and Williams which warned that the verdict in the case “threatens to punish songwriters for creating new music that is inspired by prior works.”

This, of course, is the entire point of the Copy-Me documentary, that all artists and creators in various niches rely on those who went before to provide ideas and artistic inspiration. There truly is nothing new under the sun, but sadly that also includes highly questionable copyright hits on YouTube, pointing out that very thing.

“We used samples [from the songs] to make the point that the biggest copyright lawsuit of the decade ($5m) is a travesty that can have serious repercussions on inspiration and creativity,” Lungu says.

“The two songs are similar in the way any two funk songs are similar, and we play other samples from other songs to make that point. There’s no other way to show that… other than to actually play them. This is clearly covered by fair use: to use a fragment of a song in an educational material, for non-commercial purposes to make a point about that very song.”

It remains to be seen whether this problem will be resolved quickly, or indeed resolved at all. However, Lungu firmly believes that if a platform like YouTube uses automated detection systems, there must be a clear and simple way to dispute false positives.

“[The platform] should explain what you can do in the easiest way possible. It should explain how copyright actually works and how using someone else’s work can be completely legal, even without anyone’s permission,” he says.

“Copyright isn’t property, but not that many people know that. And we should have a strict way of taxing those who claim works that aren’t theirs. Why should repeat infringers have a three-strike policy, but repeat abusers shouldn’t?”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB1KE5dbOZo]

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