In recent years, the Japanese publishing industry has gotten serious about cracking down on manga pirating sites- especially in the wake of digital manga subscriptions rising and print manga readership steadily declining. As part of those efforts, publishing rivals Kadokawa, Kodansha, Shueisha and Shogakukan all collectively sued one of the world's biggest website infrastructure providers, Cloudflare. The group alleged that Cloudflare caching of illegal manga content violated copyright laws and filed lawsuits in Tokyo and New York.
The suit was filed in August 2018 and it has now been revealed that Cloudflare has agreed to settle for an undisclosed sum.
Manga fans in the U.S. are very interested in the crackdown as there's a vast amount of titles that never receive proper translations and the only way fans can read some obscure fan favorites are via scanlation sites. So far, manga publishers have only targeted sites that offer "raw" uploads i.e. sites that target the Japanese demographic. Sites that offer fansubs are safe so far but it seems inevitable that once all the pirate sites that cater to Japanese otaku are dealt with, North American scanlation and fansub sites might be next.
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