In cooperation with 15 major anime production companies and manga publishers, the Japanese government will next month start a huge extermination operation against foreign sites which have illegally uploaded anime and manga contents on the web without the copyright holders' permission, NHK reported on July 28th. While the government has started supporting the genre as one of their important cultural exports, there appears to be no end of illegal uploading of anime and manga via pirate sites, mainly operated by Chinese. The Cultural Affairs Agency estimates the loss caused by the Chinese pirate sites last year was amounted to at least 560 billion yen (about US$ 5.5 billion).

On August 1st, the government will start simultaneously sending requests to delete illegal anime and manga contents to the operators of the 580 foreign pirate sites which they have found. In addition, the operation will launch a new site to guide the fans to a legitimate site offering some 250 titles including the latest ones at a cost of several hundred yen.

Official Manga-Anime Guardians site: http://manga-anime-here.com/

Source: NHK News

News submitted by BydeFinition


Update July 30
METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) has published a press release stating 500 manga works and 80 anime works are being targeted, not websites. The press release includes a PowerPoint that contains an actual list of websites they are targeting. Included are scanlation sites (slides 11-12), fansub upload websites (slides 13-15), direct download websites (slide 16), torrent sites (slides 17-18), and redistribution websites (slides 19-20).

Source: METI press release