This news post is a bit late, but that's because we were trying to investigate and obtain responses from all the parties involved.

Our recent downtime last week was a result of two DMCA requests. It was from an intermediary on behalf of two different companies. Unfortunately, our host did not notify us and instead disabled our IP address immediately. The most recent requests were due to displaying copyrighted cover art. As some of you have noticed, we have removed the images from some respective series pages (hopefully temporarily). We are currently in the process of looking for another host. It is unacceptable to cause severe downtime without forwarding the requests to us and allowing us to respond. It is likewise poor form by the intermediary to use such tactics without attempting to contact us directly.

Thank you, MU Staff

Last edited by lambchopsil at 8:31 am, Oct 30 2014

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A just ruler amongst tyrants

Jesus fucking Christ.

Itallcomestumblingdown.flac

selfcest!?

Oh pleaaase, pleaaase not MU ;___;

May you find better host!

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What a great host! Wikipedia would love to have your host.
Sarcasm aside, a host and domain outside the US would be most favorable for you it seems considering the events in the past year.
Truth be told though, the ones sending these DMCAs know as much about copyright and fair use as "Wikipedia is a safe harbor for pirates"-people. Even the DMCA for links last year was illegal.

I was wondering about that. Kinda strange to not allow cover art (in most cases, less than half of the cover art at that).

This is just dumb, dmca because the cover? Do they sell manga in bags? or wrapped in something to hide the covers? LOL no one would buy them if they didn't see the covers.

Now that is just fucking sad. Seen as it isn't all that difficult to figure out which companies were behind this, their stock just went down a bunch in my books.

A really good way to increase my inclination to buy your products.... oh, wait.

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Not sure if your host is the same as your domain registrar, but I've heard some pretty horrible stories about GoDaddy, especially in regards to DMCAs. They'll pretty much always screw you over and never investigate anything (stuff like people making bogus DMCA claims against competitors who use GoDaddy).

I don't care what Kodansha says, it's fair use. Otherwise, Wikipedia would never be able to put up cover images of albums or anything like that. Over the years, I've grown to dislike Kodansha. I hate how they dominate the market and refuse to get with the times because it threatens their monopoly.

(P.S. @lambchop The link to the thread identifying "a certain publisher" is broken.)

So. the only thing that is neither publicly available information or user-written are the publicly available covers so they get attacked... Really...

First time I've seen publishers dumb enough to censor their OWN promotional pictures, because what else are covers?

Thanks for the news!

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in need of romance?
uncommon, sad, sweet

more attacks from crunchyroll and horrible to shut down everyone

DMCA'd again? For fuck's sake! Go fuck yourself, Crunchyroll and Kodansha. I understood the legal issues surrounding the removal of scanlator groups but this is insane, this is unarguably fair use of the covers.

Take a look at Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nanatsu_no_Taizai_Volume_1.png

They host the same content, and even they consider it fair use:

From the "Licensing" section of that page:

This image is of book cover(s), and the copyright for it is most likely owned either by the artist who created the cover(s) or the publisher of the book(s). It is believed that the use of low-resolution images of book covers

- to illustrate an article discussing the book in question
- on the English-language Wikipedia, hosted on servers in the United States by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation,

qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law. Other use of this image, on Wikipedia or elsewhere, might be copyright infringement. See Wikipedia:Non-free content for more information.

MU operates under the same conditions, therefore the same rules apply to them. Fight back MU, don't let them reduce you to uselessness!

Last edited by Chojiki at 5:06 am, Oct 30 2014

I understood when download links were removed. I could sort of understand when links to scanlation groups were removed as well. But covers? The Japanese seem to be rather strict when it comes to image copyright (at least I think so, considering that most anime/manga related articles on Japanese wikipedia have no images at all), but nobody would seriously think that images on the site could cause losses to the publisher. And contacting your host behind your back was a really rude thing to do. And the host is no better.
It's annoying that a useful site like MU that doesn't publish anything illegal is constantly harassed with ridiculous DMCA requests, while online manga aggregator sites continue to prosper without any problems.

I don't understand the commotion.
What's the big deal?
MU has been dead ever since the links were removed.
And seriously, who needs covers anyway??
Just go to your friendly local online reader and you're set.

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Key point is "believed", no one has ever really challenged or argued in court whether it is fair use. So even Wikipedia is open to DMCA for this. Simple fact is that most companies do not care, and do consider this fair use. The real question is whether Kodansha would actually be bothered to take it to court because they don't regard it as fair use. In which case they would be nuts.

Awwww so even databases can be hit by DMCA requests, lol. That's a new one but the world is funny enough already so it doesn't surprise me much.

Kinda sux but from a strategic point of view I would get mangaupdates closed to. After all, it contains all the information about what has been scanlated and what is being scanlated each day. So if it was me I would use every option to do something about mu so I could illegal scanlations. (I'm sure people won't argue about this anymore...if they want to then they should read the law about this. We had this discussion a trillion times in the past already) So if I get mu removed then the online readers will have a hard time to find stuff to put up on their readers and the readers will also be forced to visit every group's site they like to get their manga. Not to mention they will be forced to keep their eyes and ears for new groups popping up and doing their manga. This will require efforts from their side and many will stop reading manga because it's not worth their time to put this much effort into it. So brilliant strategy if they can carry it out.

I don't get why people start screaming about kodansha or other publishes on this thread. What will that affect? The publishers aren't even reading what you are writing. Send them mails or something so they can hear your opinion being voiced. If you are just using this thread as a stress relief then carry on and I apologize for my lack of understanding.

I agree with the others; it's under law fair use to have covers and single pages of a work posted on your site. It makes no sense that they can have the covers removed.