Japanese Animation Company Sues Hundreds of ‘One Piece’ Downloaders in One Bunch

One Piece, by Nina Yasmine on Flickr

I was curious to see over on AnimeNewsNetwork that Toei Animation had filed a complaint in District of Columbia district court (in September of last year) regarding copyright infringment of its popular One Piece series on peer-to-peer networks. What’s remarkable here is that the complaint is filed against 869 ‘John Does’ whom Toei asserts “worked in concert, via the internet … to reproduce and distribute unlawful, digital copies.”

The suit refers to them as a “filesharing swarm,” and according to ANN’s report, Toei has also filed a motion to obtain their names and addresses which the court has apparently granted.

The last big suit like this regarding One Piece was FUNinmation’s suit in Texas court over episode 481 back in January of last year which bunched 1,337 defendants into a single suit. Judge Royal Furgeson subsequenly severed 1,336 of the 1,337 defendants, explaining:

There are no allegations in Plaintiff’s Complaint that the Defendants are in any way related to each other, or that they acted in concert or as a group in the allegedly infringing actions … Indeed, it seems that the copyright infringement claim against each Defendant is based on the individual acts of each Defendant.

I’m not going to defend illegal file-sharing, but it seems to me that Toei/FUnimation could solve many of its problems by implementing a decent digital distribution model. I’m not a huge anime fan, but I’m told that it’s not on Crunchy Roll (or at least licensing restrictions prevent me from watching anything) and a quick search for ‘one piece download purchase’ gives me a page peppered with DMCA notices from FUnimation. Similarly, the official One Piece page only links me to Amazon where I can buy the DVD [1].

There seems to be huge demand, but once again, Japanese publishers are not adapting as quickly as they should – instead relying on repeated litigation, rather than digital innovations.

Photo: Nina Yasmine on Flickr