Manganews Forum provides more details about the three men arrested for posting manga on the internet without getting copyright permissions.
The website, 464.jp (pronounced “Read!” in Japanese), was intended as promotion for the manga and internet cafe “Ichigo” in Oota-ku, Tokyo. Touted as “Free Manga Browsing,” the scans amounted to over 17,000 volumes, including 1,300 titles by nearly 700 authors. Nine titles named in the investigation were Akamatsu Ken’s “Love Hina,” Akimoto Osamu’s “Kochi Kame,” Adachi Mitsuru’s “Touch,” Ichijou Yukari’s “Tadashii Ren’ai no Susume,” Inoue Takehiko’s “Slam Dunk,” Urasawa Naoki’s “MONSTER,” Shigeno Shuuichi’s “Initial D,” Takahashi Rumiko’s “Maison Ikkoku,” and Fujisawa Tooru’s “GTO.”
In September 2005, several major manga publishers and an association of authors warned suspect Muramoto Toraji, 52, to cease distribution, but by December the website was still open. On January 5th, publishers and authors complained to the police, who investigated the website.
One of the suspects, Muramoto Toraji, explained,
“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.”
“Later,” in this case, may have meant, “after we start charging for content.” The site was about to start charging for views and the proprietors had already collected 2 million yen.
Manga news links to two stories in Japanese; this one from Asahi Shimbun has a nice photo of a cop (I assume) with computers and lots of manga.
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Three arrested for posting manga on the net
More on the manga arrests
[…] (Slam Dunk). This civil suit is the latest development in a case that began last year with the arrests of the three men shortly after their website switched from a free to a paid model. They had only […]