The Tokyo District Court recently ordered two homepage owners and two Internet companies to pay 11 manga artists a total of 20.32 million yen for unauthorized uploading of the artists’ works.

According to the ruling, the two homepage maintainers scanned volumes of 45 titles, including [Tetsuya] Chiba’s Ashita no Joe, [Takehiko] Inoue’s Slam Dunk, [Hiroshi] Motomiya’s Salaryman Kintaro, [Go] Nagai’s Devilman, and [Takao] Saito’s Golgo 13, and uploaded them onto the Internet without authorization from September of 2005 to January of 2006.
The ruling calculated the compensation by taking 35% of the average 300-yen (US$2.60) price of the volumes’ e-book versions and multiplying that by the number of times the files were browsed for a total of 18.8 million yen (US$165,000). Ten of the plaintiffs were awarded an additional 200,000 yen (US$2,000) each for costs, and the 11th plaintiff was awarded an additional 320,000 yen (US$2,800) for costs.