Judge Lewis J. Liman of the Southern District Court of New York, dismissed the lawsuit filed by publishers Shueisha, Kodansha, Kadokawa and Shogakukan against unidentified administrators of the manga piracy website Hoshi no Romi and three others housed in the United States, last May 11.
The four Japanese publishers submitted a notice in which they would voluntarily withdraw the lawsuit since May 8. The notice included a comment from the editorials stating: "We plaintiffs will continue to seek civil and criminal means to assert our rights, and we will re-file this lawsuit if the defendant's infringing activities are restarted or if the situation requires it." .
The facts
On November 20, the court granted publishers the possibility of conducting an investigation into the identities of the administrators. However, publishers subsequently reported on difficulties encountered in trying to unmask the administrator or administrators of the Hoshi no Romi site. The companies even asked the internet provider companies for information that could guide them to identify the administrators, as well as hired a consulting company to analyze the data.
Due to "the defendants 'efforts to remain undercover," the publishers' group attorney last February 25 requested a 90-day extension to identify the suspects. The court accepted the request, giving the publishers until May 20 to complete the process. Shortly thereafter, the publishers filed a motion to withdraw their own attorney, Michael J. Druckman, from the case on March 16, and was finally "fired" on May 1.
The original demand
The publishers filed the lawsuit on September 4, alleging that the Hoshi no Romi website and three other websites were hosting more than 93,000 scanned manga volumes, being the successors to other sites such as Mangamura, and therefore violating the copyright and making profit from this. The companies were seeking to have the damage repaired and those sites closed.
Furthermore, the manga hacking website Hoshi no Romi appears to owe its name to Romi Hoshino, also nicknamed Zakay Romi, an alleged Mangamura administrator. The four defendant sites were found to be inaccessible in mid-September, the same month that Hoshino was arrested and extradited to Japan.
Furthermore, the manga piracy website Mangamura was withdrawn in April 2018. Japanese publishers filed complaints against the site between summer and fall 2017, and Japanese authorities revealed in May 2018 that they had started an investigation. against the site. In addition to Hoshino, the police made several other arrests related to the illegal uploading of images to the site.
Source: PACER
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