Company Threatening to Kill World’s Biggest Free Adult Manga Site Once Offered to Be Partners

New evidence submitted in PCR Distributing’s major lawsuit against the world’s biggest free adult manga site, Nhentai, reveals that the former actually offered to work with Nhentai on multiple occasions.

In August 2024, PCR Distributing launched a lawsuit against Nhentai for copyright infringement, requesting a court subpoena that could unmask names, addresses, login information, billing records, server logs, IP addresses, email exchanges and more, as reported by Torrent Freak. Nhentai is fighting this, alleging that it doesn’t store any infringing content on its own servers and is merely a service provider. It’s also seeking protection against the subpoena, arguing that if any information must be revealed, it should remain private. Despite the legal tension between the two companies, a surprising development was that David Goldberg, the managing editor of PCR-sister company J18, reached out to Nhentai in 2020, offering the opportunity to keep the infringing content up in exchange for advertising space and promotion. “We don’t want to try to take down any of our galleries [on your site]– we just want people to have a simple, safe, and easy way of getting to our site where they can buy physical copies of the comics they love,” Goldberg said in an email.

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Mature Japanese Content Has a Major Presence in the West

J18 is part of a massive connected web of mature Japanese content distribution in the West, all initiated by Peter Payne. Payne first founded JAST USA in the U.S., before setting up a Japanese branch to manage translation, consulting and logistics for Japanese license holders on their behalf. Payne also set up PCR Distributing to handle packaging and distribution, along with the well-known online store and blog J-LIST, for adult goods. In the newly-revealed emails, PCR Distributing also sent Nhentai a spreadsheet of over 3,300 links of its content that it hoped to run ads on. These ads would link back to the official source. Nhentai argues that this amounted to permission to store its manga on the site. “In fact,” Nhentai said in new statements, “Plaintiff [PCR] wants Nhentai.net to use it so that Plaintiff can amass even more money from the sexually explicit materials Plaintiff sells. Plaintiff has even offered to pay Nhentai.net to run ads on its website to accomplish this goal.”

PCR disputes that its emails amounted to permission. “Here, to support their [Nhentai’s] non-exclusive license, Defendants merely cite invitations to bargain and prior negotiations,” it replied. “Under California law, an invitation to bargain is not an offer.” While the admission proves surprising, the crackdown on Nhentai will likely continue to amass an overwhelmingly negative response. The site is the world’s most accessed free adult manga site with 76.6 million visits in September; it also ranks second of any adult manga site worldwide, just behind DLSite with 78.9 million accesses, and has well over a million works uploaded (including duplicates). Despite PCR’s arguably small percentage of works on the site, with just 3,300 works (as of 2020), its lawsuit threatens to take down the site entirely.

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Nevertheless, 3,300 infringements are far from a small number to PCR. Furthermore, Similarweb data reveals that 33.68% of Nhentai’s accesses originate from Japan — double its U.S. base of 17.37%. Having already tried an amicable compromise, some may argue that PCR is well within its rights to sue; Japanese rights holders may even be hesitant to license works overseas, as they may simply end up on piracy sites with a largely Japanese base consuming them, directly affecting PCR’s ability to do business.

Source: Torrent Freak