Three arrested for posting comic books on Web

FUKUOKA (Kyodo) An Internet cafe owner in Tokyo and two other people were arrested Tuesday on suspicion of violating the Copyright Law by posting comics on a Web site without the consent of the authors and publishers, police said.

A page from a comic book by popular cartoonist Mitsuru Adachi is shown on a Web site run by an Internet cafe owner who was arrested.

The arrests, the first in Japan related to the online distribution of "manga," came after the "cyberpatrol" unit of Fukuoka Prefectural Police examined the Web site dubbed 464.jp in October.

Arrested were Manga Net Kissa Ichigo owner Toratsugu Muramoto, 52, and Hiroko Yamauchi, 34, both from Ota Ward, and Naoto Takei, 43, from Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture.

The three are suspected of scanning comic books and storing the data in a computer server in the same building as the Ota Ward cafe so they could be viewed on the Internet.

Police said the three have owned up to the allegations.

The Web site offered an apparent apology Tuesday, saying it "caused inconvenience because this site has not made any copyright contracts."

Nine authors and three publishers have filed complaints about the site.

The copied manga included "Kochira Katsushika-ku Kameari koen mae hashutsujo," a story about a police officer by Osamu Akimoto, and the basketball series "Slam Dunk," by Takehiko Inoue.

The manga site was set up last summer and has drawn around 3.3 million page views per month, according to police.

Muramoto and his colleagues were planning to shift to a paid membership service by charging 380 yen per month and had about 1,000 people signed up who together had coughed up 2 million yen from Jan. 23 to 25, police said.