Fakku Submits DMCA Subpoena to Unmask Hentai.cafe Operator

• Fakku is fed up with ‘hentai.cafe’ ignoring its take-down requests, so it now seeks legal action.
• They have submitted a DMCA subpoena asking Cloudflare to hand over identification details.
• Fakku used to be a pirate site itself for over nine years but is now on the other side of the fence.

Fakku has served Cloudflare Inc. a DMCA subpoena, hoping that the internet giant holds the identity of the operator of ‘Hentai.cafe,’ a pirate website that reposts their content without a license. The platform is asking Cloudflare to hand over all the information sufficient to identify the operator and/or owner of Hentai.cafe, including their full name, address, phone number, email addresses, IP addresses, account number, payment details, credit card data, and anything else they may have on them.

What’s interesting here is the fact that Fakku started out back in 2006 as a “scanlation” platform, which is to translate and post Japanese manga magazines and share them with other users for free. So, essentially, Fakku used to be a pirate site itself, and that lasted for a period of nine years - up until 2015 when it turned legal and only offered licensed content. The success that Fakku enjoys today is at least partially attributed to those early days when it built a large followership.

Today, Fakku is very aggressive towards other scanlation or manga pirate sites, and the DMCA against Hentai.cafe isn’t their only move. As reported by TorrentFreak, since the start of this year, Fakku has asked Google to delist around 4 million URLs from its Search results, and they resubmitted the same request two weeks later.

It is clear that the platform is dedicating significant resources to identifying infringing links and striving to take them all down. Notable examples include ‘hentaishark.com,’ ‘nyahentai.com,’ and ‘nhentai.net.’

Back to hentai.cafe, the website remains online, so its operators haven’t been moved much by the takedown notice they received in the recent past, nor the DMCA subpoena. Reportedly, Fakku’s effort to take down copyright protected content posted on Hentai.cafe started on December 1, 2020, so the subpoena comes as a last-resort solution now.

The court hasn’t signed-off the request yet, but these are usually not getting stuck when they’re well substantiated. The problem usually lies in the validity of the information handed over by the service provider - in this case, Cloudflare. If it’s real, we may see Fakku using the info to launch legal action against Hentai.cafe and eventually taking it offline.