The first steps in the hentai piracy case took a turn for the worse this month when court documents revealed the aggrieved publisher sent emails admitting the crime would not stop. In a series of communications from the publisher to the crime scene, the publisher also tried to buy banner ads on the site and provided a list of specific pages where they wanted the ads to appear.
TorrentFreak has been following the strange story of nHentai and PCR Distributing. nHentai is a popular site that provides free hentai scans from major publishers. It received 80 million visitors in June. PCR Distributing is the company that publishes most of the last filth on nHentai.
Over the summer, PCR began pursuing legal action against nHentai. It started with the DMCA and has escalated to a full lawsuit. In court papers filed on October 14, PCR asked the court for an early finding in the case. The people who run nHentai are still anonymous and listed as “John Doe.” PCR wants Cloudflare and other services to cough up their identities.
Lawyers for nHentai pushed back against PCR, saying in their filings that PCR is asking them to turn around too much and doesn’t want to divulge user information. Surprisingly, the documents also revealed several emails allegedly between PCR staff and nHentai in which, according to nHentai, the publisher gave the site confidential permission to post its content.
A 2020 email allegedly from a PCR employee to nHentai provided a compelling argument about the limits of copyright claims in the digital world. “I want to emphasize that this is not an abatement or DCMA request,” the email said. “I’ve spent enough time on the beach myself to know they’re useless and nobody listens to them.”
“We know that people don’t always have the money to buy legally issued items, or they just don’t want to pay for them,” the email continued. “We know that the only reason any anime or manga market exists in the West is because of piracy, so we’re not interested in trying to fight any sites about these things.”
After that the worker gave the agreement. They wanted to place banner ads on nHentai that would allow users to easily purchase content they enjoyed for free, if they wanted to. “The banners are not intended to be offensive, offensive, embarrassing or make you feel bad,” the email said. “They’re just there so that fans who want to have their favorite English-language doujinshi versions that are authentic, unverified, can buy them.”
The court document shared several emails between nHentai and various employees from PCR. In one, the publisher shared a spreadsheet with a list of pages where they wanted to host their banner ads. In another, PCR repeats the claim that it does not want nHentai to take down any of its images and asks how much it would cost to buy ad space on the site.
“We will be selling here soon,” the email said. So I was wondering about short term adspace in the general areas of the site, and how much that would cost. It would probably take a month or more.”
PCR pushed back against nHentai in court papers filed on October 21. It made it clear that the current legal battle is about early detection and not about the case, as a whole. “In support of his claim of ‘consent’ the Defendant cites an unauthorized email that is completely actionable,” PCR lawyers said in court documents. “Even if taken as true, it does not constitute a license or permission to use plaintiff’s copyrighted material.” It also said it sent DMCA notices after 2020 that nHentai could ignore.
The court has yet to rule on the early discovery request and it’s a good bet that this legal battle over pirated hentai will continue for a long time yet.
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