After launching in 2006 as an unlicensed ‘pirate’ platform, over the years scanlation site ‘Fakku’ managed to grow into something more legitimate.
After offering scanlations of adult manga comics (hentai) for years without obtaining permission from the original copyright holders, the site is now a fully-licensed affair. As a result, it now has to contend with pirate sites offering its own content for free.
Fakku Uses DMCA Subpoenas To Identify Pirate Rivals
As previously reported, last December Eric Green of anti-piracy company Remove Your Media wrote to pirate platform Hentai.cafe demanding that the site take down a comic to which Fakku holds the license. When that request fell on deaf ears, Fakku’s legal representative filed a request for a DMCA subpoena at a court in the Eastern District of Michigan.
The aim of that request is to compel CDN company Cloudflare, which Hentai.cafe uses to keep itself online, to hand over the personal details of its allegedly infringing customer. That doesn’t appear to have happened yet but in the meantime, Fakku is lining up another target.
Fakku Also Targeting HentaiNexus.com
Complying with properly-formatted DMCA takedown notices can be a good strategy for keeping copyright holders at bay. However, it appears that HentaiNexus.com, a site with 2.2 million visitors per month according to SimilarWeb, hasn’t complied with at least one and probably many more.
On December 1, 2020, Remove Your Media’s Eric Green wrote to the site demanding that the comic ‘Eroween Panic’ be removed from the site, since it infringes Fakku’s copyrights. However, despite the notice correctly identifying the offending URL, HentaiNexus appears to have ignored the request. That led to Fakku escalating the matter to court.
In an application for DMCA subpoena filed at the same Michigan court involved in the Hentai.cafe matter, Fakku is demanding that Cloudflare unmasks the operator of HentaiNexus.com, which claims to be “the largest English hentai publisher in the world.”
The information requested from Cloudflare includes billing or administrative records that show the “name(s), address(es), telephone number(s), email address(es), IP address(es), account number(s), credit card numbers and any other electronic or physical documents identifying the name(s) and address(es) or contact information of the operator and/or owner of the Infringing Website.”
Quite what Fakku intends to do with this information once obtained remains to be seen but it’s probably safe to say that the licensed hentai platform’s patience is running a little thin when it comes to dealing with the HentaiNexus operation.
According to Google’s transparency report, Fakku and anti-piracy partner Remove Your Media have filed requests to have more than 245,000 HentaiNexus URLs removed from Google’s search results. While Google rejected more than 35% due to duplicate entries (and another 10% due to content not being in its indexes), that still leaves more than 133,400 URLs on the site that reportedly infringe Fakku’s rights.
All of that being said, HentaiNexus has been experiencing other problems recently too. A few weeks ago, users reported the site to be unstable and in some cases inaccessible. That seemed to have prompted some server upgrades which are now being financed by the placing of adverts on the site.
Whether Fakku will go after more site operators in the same way is currently unclear.
However, if we take a look at Google data listing the domains that cause Fakku the most problems, we can see that hentaishark.com, nyahentai.com, nhentai.net, readhent.ai, hentai4manga.com and asmhentai.com have around 18 million complaints filed against them in total. That makes them potential candidates for future action.
