Japanese government may soon ask internet providers to block illegal manga sites ⋆ Anime & Manga

After announcing their plans to thwart online piracy, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) has revealed its Manga-Anime Guardians project which will actively work to remove illegally uploaded anime and manga.

The committee consists of top anime and manga studios and distributors including Aniplex, Kadokawa, Good Smile Company, Kodansha, Sunrise, Shueisha, Shogakukan, ShoPro, Studio Ghibli, Tezuka Productions, Toei Animation, TMS Entertainment, Bandai Namco Games, Pierrot, and Bushiroad. Together, they will be targeting 580 sources of illegal content worldwide over the span of the next 5 months. The operation has launched a new website to guide fans to legitimate sites that offer popular titles at a cost of no more than several hundred yen.

According to the METI, over half of anime and manga fans based in the United States watch and read pirated works. The estimated cost of damage from online piracy is as much as $20 billion worldwide. In fact, a popular site used for piracy is ranked 156 in Japan, amongst the very same companies it steals from. This is a huge problem that is growing more and more every year.

In recent years, the “pirates” that use these sites have begun earning revenue, through advertisements, URL shortners that pay according to hits, affiliations with E-commerce sites, and by selling Apps. “They are exploiting Manga and Anime just for the sake of money,” the Manga-Anime Guardians project claims.

Publishers have tried to submit DMCA notices to the sites that host them for years, but it takes time to process and validate their requests but the uploader can just continue to publish the same materials under a new name. Now they are banding together so their efforts aren’t in vain.

Here is just a small portion of which sites they will be targeting first.