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1 Mangamura Suspect Pleads Guilty, 1 Pleads Innocent on 1st Day in Court
posted on by Rafael Antonio Pineda
The Fukuoka district court held the arraignment on Monday for two suspects who are allegedly related to the Japanese manga piracy website Mangamura. One suspect pleaded guilty, and the other pleaded not guilty.
The Fukuoka Prefectural Police One Piece manga, as well as other manga on Mangamura without permission. The 26-year-old male suspect Kōta Fujisaki pleaded guilty, and 24-year-old female suspect Shiho Itō pleaded not guilty.
Both Fujisaki and Itō were reportedly friends of a 28-year-old male named Romi Hoshino, a.k.a. Zakay Romi, the alleged manager of Mangamura. The Philippine Bureau of Immigration arrested another alleged Mangamura-related individual named Wataru Adachi (37) on August 10.
The prosecution claimed that Fujisaki began handling updates to the site in late 2016, and allegedly began involvement with gathering images for the site in February 2017. Adachi supposedly gave instructions to both suspects. But around April 2017, they began receiving direct instructions from Hoshino, with the suspects receiving payment twice a month.
The Mangamura site launched in 2016. Japanese authorities Square Enix are currently considering civil action to recover damages incurred by the authors and publishers.
The Japanese government officially Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported on the same day that the site did not shut down due to site-blocking from Internet service providers. According to the newspaper's source from a service provider, the action could not have been performed by anyone aside from the site's s.
The Japanese government's request asked the providers to voluntarily block access, but the government plans to create new legislation in 2019 to expand the scope of site-blocking. Currently, the site-blocking law is only applicable to child pornography.
According to Japan's Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), between September 2017 and February 2018, s accessed Mangamura about 620 million times. The association estimated that this caused 319.2 billion yen ($2.92 billion) worth of damage to copyright holders in Japan during that time.
Source: Nikkei
