One Piece Publisher Scores U.S. Court Win as America’s Last Major Manga Piracy Hub Collapses
One Piece publisher Shueisha has scored a landmark court win against piracy site Mangajikan, with a ruling that turbocharges DMCA subpoenas and clears the way to unmask infringers hiding behind services like Cloudflare.
If you follow manga publishing even a little, this one matters: Shueisha, the One Piece publisher, just won a court fight that could make it way easier to unmask the people running manga piracy sites hiding behind services like Cloudflare.
What happened
Shueisha went after the operator of Mangajikan, a piracy site that pulled huge monthly traffic before shutting down in June 2025. Instead of playing whack-a-mole with mirror sites, Shueisha aimed a DMCA subpoena at Cloudflare, the content delivery network Mangajikan used, to pry loose the operator's identity and info about related domains.
The arguments, translated from legal-ese
The Mangajikan operator pushed back with a familiar defense: Cloudflare was just a conduit. In other words, it claimed Cloudflare only provided CDN and DNS services, simply passing data along without storing it. Under that logic, Cloudflare would fit under DMCA Section 512(a), which makes it tougher to force a provider to hand over user data. The operator also said a U.S. court had no business here because the site blocked U.S. visitors and ran non-commercially.
Shueisha countered with something practical and hard to argue with: caching. Cloudflare does store copies of site data on its servers to speed things up. That kind of storage pushes it into the DMCA Section 512(c) bucket instead, which comes with different obligations. Shueisha even backed it up with a screenshot from Cloudflare's own materials.
The ruling
The district judge sided with Shueisha. Cloudflare has been ordered to turn over identifying information tied to the Mangajikan operator: name, address, phone numbers, emails, billing details, and IP address logs. That is not a small amount of data.
Why this is a big deal
For years, publishers have been stuck playing cleanup: shut one site, three more pop up. Going at the infrastructure level changes that dynamic. If a court says Cloudflare can be compelled to hand over the goods because of how its caching works, it gets a lot easier to find out who is actually running these operations. That does two things at once: it puts real pressure on piracy site operators, and it signals to fans that if you want your favorite creators to keep making work, the legal platforms need support.
The recent takedown trail
- Mangamura — 2018
- Manga Rock — 2019
- KissManga — 2020
- Mangakakalot — 2024
- Comick.io — 2025
What to watch next
Cloudflare has to comply with the order, and if/when Shueisha uses that data to go after the Mangajikan operator, expect other publishers to study the playbook. The bottom line: the court effectively treated Cloudflare's caching as storage, and that subtle distinction could reshape how piracy cases get pursued from here on out.