Three Japanese men who scanned lots and lots of manga and posted it on a website were sentenced and fined on May 17.
According to a story posted last February, Toratsugu Muramoto, the owner of an Internet cafe in Fukuoka, and two other men, Naoto Takei and Hiroko Yamauchi, were arrested on charges of posting scans of manga on a website without the permission of the creators or the publishers. The three admitted to scanning and posting the manga, which included Slam Dunk and Love Hina. Initially the site offered free viewing, and it was pulling in about 3.3 million page views per month. The three were planning to shift to a paid model in January and had signed up about 1,000 people, who were willing to pay 380 yen a month for the service. Nine manga-ka and three publishers had filed complaints about the site, according to the article, and a followup on Manganews listed some of the pirated titles and noted that police confiscated 17,552 manga when they raided the cafe and the suspects’ homes.
Muramoto stated in regards to the investigation, “To promote the manga cafe, we showed 1 or 2 pages of each title, but I thought if we were going to get caught infringing copyrights anyway, let’s show all of them. I thought we could pay the copyright fees later.”
Well, it didn’t work out that way. Here’s the latest from Anime News Service:
On May 17th The Fukuoka district court handed down a penalty of 500,000 Yen and a 3 year prison sentence (2 years were suspended).
It’s not clear whether all the men got the same sentence, or whether the fine was 500,000 yen each or for all three. But it does look like these guys got the book thrown at them (so to speak).