The early stages of a hentai piracy lawsuit got interesting this month when court documents revealed that the aggrieved publisher had sent emails admitting that piracy is impossible to stop. In a series of communications from the publisher to the piracy site, the publisher also attempted to buy banner ads on the site and provided a list of specific pages where it wanted the ads to appear.
TorrentFreak has been following the strange tale of nHentai and PCR Distributing. nHentai is a popular website that provides free scans of hentai from big publishers. It got 80 million visitors in June. PCR Distributing is a company that published a lot of the filth that ends up on nHentai.
Over the summer, PCR started to pursue legal action against nHentai. It began with a DMCA and has escalated to a full blown lawsuit. In court documents filed on October 14, PCR asked the court for early discovery in the case. The people running nHentai are still anonymous and listed as “John Doe.” PCR wants Cloudflare and other services to cough up their identity.
nHentai’s lawyers pushed back on PCR, claiming in its own documents that PCR was asking them to turn over too much and that it didn’t want to reveal any user data. In a surprise twist, the documents also revealed several emails allegedly between PCR employees and nHentai where, according to nHentai, the publisher gave the site tacit permission to post its content.
A 2020 email allegedly from a PCR employee to nHentai gave an eloquent argument about the limitations of copyright claims in the digital world. “I want to stress this is not a takedown request or a DCMA,” the email said. “I’ve spent enough time sailing the high seas myself to know that they’re pointless and nobody listens to them anyway.”
“We know that people don’t always have the money to buy official releases, or just don’t want to pay for them,” the email continued. “We know that the only reason any market at all for anime or manga exists in the West is because of piracy, so we’re not interested in trying to fight any sites about this stuff.”
Then the employee offered a deal. They wanted to place banner ads on nHentai that would allow users to easily purchase the material they were enjoying for free, should they want to. “The banners aren’t meant to be intrusive, they don’t move, they don’t try to shame or make you feel bad,” the email said. “They’re just there so that fans who want to own physical, uncensored, english-language versions of the doujinshi they love so much can purchase them.”
The court document shared several more emails between nHentai and various employees from PCR. In one, the publisher shared a spreadsheet that contained a list of pages where they wanted to host their banner ads. In another, PCR repeated the claim that it didn’t want nHentai to take down any of its images and then asked how much it would cost to buy ad space on the site.
“We’re running a sale here soon,” the email said. “So I was wondering about shorter term adspace on general areas of the site, and how much that would cost. It’d probably run for about a month or so.”
PCR pushed back on nHentai in court documents filed on October 21. It made clear that the current legal battle was about early discovery and not about the case, overall. “To support its claim of ‘permission’ Defendant cites an unauthenticated email that could be completely made up,” PCR’s lawyers said in the court documents. “Even taken as true, it does not establish a license or consent to use Plaintiff’s copyright protected content.” It also said that it had sent DMCA notices after 2020 that nHentai ignored.
The court has yet to rule on the request for early discovery and it’s a good bet that this legal battle over pirate hentai will grind on for some time yet.
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