Japan: Tokyo District Court found Cloudflare, Inc. liable for aiding infringement of publication rights through content delivery network services

On 19 November 2025, the Tokyo District Court issued a ruling in KADOKAWA, Kodansha, Shueisha and Shogakukan v Cloudflare, Inc., ordering Cloudflare, Inc. to pay JPY 121.4 million to KADOKAWA and JPY 126.5 million each to Kodansha, Shueisha and Shogakukan, with interest at 3% per annum from 21 October 2022 until payment. The court dismissed the primary claims under Article 709 of the Civil Code, finding that Cloudflare, Inc. was not the subject of automatic public transmission. The court upheld the secondary claims under Article 719(2) of the Civil Code, finding that Cloudflare, Inc. aided and abetted the operator of two piracy websites in infringing the publishers' publication rights by continuing to provide its content delivery network service after receiving notices under Title 17, Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) between 7 April 2020 and 12 November 2021. The court held that Cloudflare, Inc. was a related service provider under Article 3(1) of the Act on Measures Pertaining to Handling of Information Distribution to Prevent Rights Infringement Through Specified Telecommunications (the Information Distribution Platform Response Act), and that liability was not limited as Cloudflare, Inc. had reasonable grounds to know of the infringement and was technically capable of taking transmission prevention measures. The court further held that cache-type distribution of cached data did not qualify for the limitation on rights under Article 47-4(1) of the Copyright Act, as automatic public transmission of cached data constituted independent use of the works rather than incidental use. Damages were calculated by applying an 80% licensing rate to per-episode distribution fees and multiplying by estimated episode views derived from SimilarWeb access data, adjusted to 80% of calculated views to account for re-reading.