Japan: Tokyo District Court found Cloudflare liable for aiding copyright infringement through CDN services

On 19 November 2025, the Tokyo District Court awarded approximately JPY 1.265 billion to Kodansha, Shueisha, and Shogakukan, and JPY 1.214 billion to KADOKAWA after finding Cloudflare liable for aiding copyright infringement. The case concerned two large overseas manga piracy sites that used Cloudflare’s CDN services to cache and deliver unauthorised content, with cache hit rates of 95–99% and distribution occurring through Cloudflare servers in Japan. Although Cloudflare was not the primary infringer, the Court held it became liable once it continued providing services after receiving multiple DMCA notices between April 2020 and November 2021. The Court also ruled that Cloudflare’s caching did not qualify for the Article 47-4 copyright exception, as the CDN functions involved independent use of the works rather than incidental technical processing. Using SimilarWeb access data and applying 80% of standard licensing fees, the Court calculated damages based on each title’s proportion of total site content.