In recent years, the manga industry in Japan has embarked on a campaign to remove illegal uploading websites from competition in the region, and all indications are that it is far from over.
Despite the fact that laws and penalties were passed for the misuse of content on the networks and that the site with the most traffic in Japan, Mangamura, was taken down in 2018, to date the demand has only increased according to the Authorized Books of Japan.
The company that registers illegal activity on the networks, the ABJ, assured that its monitoring registers 240 million users who per month consume content illegally since autumn 2019.
Despite the fact that the date coincides with the peak of the pandemic in the region, the numbers are still alarming, especially when compared to Mangamura’s peak in popularity, which accumulated up to 100 million a month.
The same head of ABJ’s legal and public relations department, Atsushi Ito, confirmed the situation for the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun:
“Things are even worse than when Mangamura was at its peak. It may have been the result of social isolation ”.
With 750 pages available for this purpose, publishers in Japan can’t cope, and the increase of 14 times the usual number only makes the situation worse over time.
It is no secret to anyone that stability in the manga market is maintained based on its main consumers, that is, the Japanese public that buys magazines and volumes weekly.
If this continues, companies face a tough dilemma, where perhaps the production of these works could be affected by not generating the necessary income to continue publishing.
To counteract the situation, the legal department of the Shueisha publishing house sends 120,000 requests to the websites to stop using the copyrighted content of their magazines.
