According to the Kyoto Shimbun, on March 1, a ruling was made regarding the legal case against the Japanese national involved in the illegal distribution of manga series such as One Piece on the illegal manga aggregation site, MangaPanda.
Earlier this week, the Kyoto District Court judge, judge Mikiko Watanabe, handed out the ruling in the copyright infringement case involving a 70-year-old Japanese man, Takehisa Hidaka, and four Chinese individuals involved in the illegal distribution of Japanese Weekly Shonen Jump manga via the internet.
Hidaka, an employee at a delivery company involved in the dispatch of manga magazines to other distribution sites before they were sent off to stores nationwide, was arrested in late 2015. He was found responsible for handing out the manga magazines before their official street date in Japan, which led to the illegal online distribution of manga series such as One Piece days before its official release. Hidaka’s defense had, in a previous hearing, pleaded that the man had fulfilled his role out of a feeling of wanting to help out his Chinese accomplices and had not done it for the monetary gains, even continuing to deliver them the magazines after having been warned by his employer, the Kyoto Shimbun article says.
The judge, pointing out that Hidaka was an important cog in the whole process, stated that Hidaka was commissioned by his accomplices because of his position that allowed him to get his hands on manga magazines before their release date, and that “[his actions] extended to a crime.” Due to the severity of copyright infringement, the judge sentenced the 70-year-old Japanese national to 10 months in prison (but with a probationary period of three years).
In earlier hearings, the four Chinese individuals, similar to Hidaka, did not contest the allegations of infringement on the Japanese Copyright Act (laws regarding the Japanese Reproduction right, etc.) The judge pointed out that copyright infringement is a big problem that also extends to the global community, so she believed it is “important for harsh punishments to be dealt from the point of view of general prevention (of these kind of situations in the future).” The four Chinese individuals, however, have not yet received their sentences as their cases are still being tried.
As we mentioned in a previous post, while this event obviously will not resolve the illegal publication of manga online days before their official release, and while this isn’t the first time these sorts of arrests have happened, the Yomiuri does mention that this is “the first time a manga piracy site aimed at foreign readers has been exposed.”
If you live in a part of the world where you have access to either the official English Weekly Shonen Jump or Japanese Weekly Shonen Jump or Jump+, this is a good opportunity to ensure you have access to the latest One Piece chapter. It you haven’t yet, be sure to check out this editorial written by the One Piece Podcast‘s Zach and Jammer where they talk about “How Scanlations Ruin Your ‘One Piece’ Experience.” It costs an individual in Japan around $2 every week to read their copy of Weekly Shonen Jump digitally or in print. For those in the Anglosphere, the English Weekly Shonen Jump is available for at most $25.99 a year, or about $0.50 a week with the annual subscription. According to Japanese television network MBS, this scanlation group alone may have cost companies and their employees up to an estimated 6.5 billion yen (approximately US$53,000,000).
