legal actions or legal platforms, publishers are looking for an effective solution against piracy

The manga market is exploding, especially in France where 28 million copies sold in 2021, fueling covetousness and illegal practices. Four major Japanese manga publishers announced this week to file a complaint against an American company they accuse of hosting sites offering their pirated works. One of these sites alone would distribute nearly 4,000 manga, recording 300 million views per month.

Among the publishers at the initiative of this lawsuit, figure Shueisha, at the head of the best-selling series across the planet, such as dragonball, naruto Where One Piece. Together, the four plaintiffs intend to claim more than 3 million euros in damages.

A very symbolic amount, as manga piracy on the internet has become massive. It would have resulted in a shortfall of at least 6 billion euros in 2021 for Japanese publishers, according to estimates last month from ABJ, an organization for the defense of their intellectual property.

The scourge is also raging in France, the second nation of manga after the land of the Rising Sun. It is growing with reading on smartphones and tablets. Some readers are not always aware that they are consulting illegal sites. Others have outlaw procedures that they cannot ignore when they exchange pirated files (also called “scans”) or URL addresses to hidden storage sites.

Hacking has consequences. “If Dragon Ball had been completely hacked in the 90s, Shueisha would never have had the money or the support to launch a series like One Piece.believes Benoit Huot, manga editorial manager at Glénat. The fact of consulting pirated content is detrimental to creativity but also to all professionals in the sector, such as publishers, authors, booksellers, stores, warehouses, deliverers…”

Publishers organize the response. They try through their legal departments or specialized companies to close fraudulent sites. “Actions that take time, months or even years, to materialize. And as soon as one site closes, another appears immediately”notes Christel Hoolans, managing director of Dargaud-Lombard, which represents the manga publisher Kana.

Readers are however rarely worried as could be those who downloaded films illegally a few years ago and who received several alert letters from Hadopi before being sanctioned. “It would take armies of lawyers to be behind everyone”continues Christel Hoolans.

However, the law is on the side of the sector since hacking is a criminal offense providing for a fine of 300,000 euros and 3 years of imprisonment. “Downloading a pirate work is an infringement of copyright, constituting the offense of counterfeiting”, enlightens Maître Farah Bencheliha, lawyer in digital law and intellectual property.

“The risks are low because publishers first focus their action on illegal platforms that have great distribution power. The question is in fact complex since the law differs according to the nationality of the author.” The only thing permitted is the copying of a work for private use, but the source of the copy must still be lawful.

Publishers also rely on the National Book Union (SNE), which has its own lawyers. “We inform our members of the existence of pirate sites and we have implemented a technical solution to automate the search for links to illegal content in order to have them deleted and dereferenced. Finally, in certain cases, we engage recourse, according to the way, criminal or civil, which seems to us the most appropriate. explains Julien Chouraqui, legal director at the SNE. But it’s hard to keep up with the speed of the internet and the networks.”

It is also necessary to find a way to switch pirate readings to legality. That’s why Kana, and nine other editors like Akata and Ki-oon, decided at the end of January to join Mangas.io. The French start-up has been deployed since 2020 and appears as the Netflix of manga. Its principle: to offer, against a monthly subscription of €6.90, unlimited works, complete or in pre-publication. 150 licenses are listed.

Its founder Romain Regnier estimates according to his own studies “that for a book read legally in digital format, five are read illegally in France”. For him his model is virtuous. “Since the service has existed, 60% of users tell us that they have consumed less ‘scans’ since they have a subscription. This shows a movement and that when a legal solution exists, piracy decreases”. The platform also remunerates the authors.

“It was a long road before offering our catalog there because the exchanges with the rights holders in Japan took several years, highlighted Christel Hoolans from Kana. Even if digital reading is now more important than on paper in Japan, some authors and publishers do not want to be published online, others only want to be published in Japan and not abroad. It’s not simple…“

For its part, Glénat launched its own platform in September: Glénat Manga Max. The site is free and offers the first boards of 175 series. two adventures, One Piece and Sakamoto Days are in “simultrad”, that is to say that a new chapter published in Japan is immediately available in French. A way to go faster than pirates and their illegal translations, boosted by the impatience of readers to continue reading their favorite series.

The legal digital book economy is still in its infancy. Because the digital book today represents between 1 and 5% only of sales, all genres combined. The manga is not the only universe affected by piracy since apart from it the SNE has already acted against nearly a million pirate links and contributed to delisting more than 4 million from Google. pirate links or fishing, these sites which aim to obtain personal data in exchange for the promise of access to books.

The National Book Union says it is finally following closely the follow-up that will be given to the complaint of Japanese manga publishers in the United States to observe how “justice effectively defends copyright and sees accordingly whether it is necessary to change the law.”