Meotim, the developer of Comick, one of the world’s biggest manga piracy sites before its shutdown this week, shared a lengthy message explaining recent circumstances. You can read it below (lightly edited for clarity):
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“Sorry everyone, because of my fatal mistakes, Comick was taken down.
I built Comick in early 2021. Firstly, I saw that almost all manga sites were slow and out of date -> I thought I could do better than them. Then, when Comick became popular in 2023, my dream focused on developing Comick to become the best manga site in the world, dominating all other sites. With the timer [sic], I could help scanlator groups, and everyone wouldn’t have to deal with bad ads if Comick completely dominated.“
“But my fatal flaw was that I didn’t think publishers would target manga sites without licenses so aggressively from the beginning, and I was too focused on features for Comick and forgot other things, and I dunno — almost all CDNs, Cloudflare, and domain providers gave my information so easily. Publishers got my real information before I understood that these things were serious.“
“The reason is, I am just an honest, straightforward man without a wife yet – I always thought I wasn’t doing anything bad and didn’t need to hide my identity. I was naive and thought I could even purchase licenses if Comick grew enough, like Crunchyroll.“
“In the end, I couldn’t finish my dream. I really feel sorry that I couldn’t save Comick for everyone. I hope there will be a person who has higher skills than me, only takes minimum revenue from ads, and helps scanlators – someone who will appear to finish what I couldn’t continue to build.“
In the three months before Comick’s shutdown, the site racked up nearly 400 million visits (per Similarweb), adding what it says were hundreds of comics and thousands of chapters each week. It’s still unconfirmed which publishers sought Comick’s operator’s information, likely sending cease and desist notices; DMCA tracker Lumen revealed that hundreds of takedown notices filed on behalf of numerous publishers, including Kodansha, VIZ Media, and Haksan Publishing, have been sent to Google in the last 10 days alone.
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Publisher Kakao Entertainment’s anti-piracy unit, P.CoK (Protecting the Content of Kakao Entertainment), celebrates the shutdown of Comick:
You can check out P.CoK’s interview with Reaper Scans, which was released after forcing the notable web novel and webtoon piracy site to shut down after sending cease and desist notices in the spring.
Source: Reddit
©Gege Akutami/Shueisha/JUJUTSU KAISEN Project
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