The massive November 18 outage wasn’t the only topic centering around US-based internet infrastructure company Cloudflare this week. On November 19 (JST), the Tokyo District Court ruled that Cloudflare is liable for damages in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Japanese publishers Shueisha, Kodansha, Shogakukan, and Kadokawa in 2022.
The ruling recognizes nearly 3.6 billion yen, or $24 million, in damages to the publishers. However, the publishers only claimed a portion of the damages suffered was due to Cloudflare, so the company was ordered to pay about 500 million yen, or nearly $3.3 million, in damages.
Shueisha, Kodansha, Shogakukan, and Kadokawa issued a joint statement to announce the court ruling, stating that the ruling aids in the prevention of misuse of content delivery network services, or CDN, such as Cloudflare. The companies will continue to protect the rights and works of creators, along with taking firm action against copyright infringement wherever present. Moreover, the publishers reiterated their belief that CDN services are beneficial when used for “stable and efficient delivery of legitimate content to users.”
The lawsuit was filed in 2022, and it alleged that Cloudflare distributes data for manga piracy sites that infringe on the publishers’ copyrights. The companies sought an injunction and compensation totally nearly 460 million yen, or $4 million in 2022, in damages.
The news came just a day after Cloudflare experienced a major outage, which reportedly affected nearly 100 million websites, including Final Weapon. The outage was caused by a change in one of Cloudflare’s database systems’ permissions, which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system.
