Shueisha Is Targeting Shonen Jump Leakers

Everyone who is into reading Shonen Jump‘s latest content quickly learns that, despite the magazine being launched on Sundays/Mondays (it’s on Mondays in Japan, but depending on where you live, it’s on Sundays), the leaks are usually out mid-week (around Wednesday). Many One Piece fans get information about the next chapters before the official launch, for example — sometimes even when they don’t want to, because these leaks quickly spread through social media.

Leakers are unlikely to be all part of the “same team”, since it seems there are too many of them to consider everyone involved in any sort of “organized leaking industry”. But they can be problematic for Shueisha, the publisher of the Shonen Jump magazine. The company has been trying to target and stop leakers for a while.

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Recently, an X (formerly Twitter) user (@AsarathaHS) shared part of the documents presented to California courts, in which they request identifying information on at least two accounts (one of them is already deactivated):

Note that Shueisha’s subpoena was filed in California (where X is based), and not in Japan, so this is probably an action tackling activities in X (despite the accounts posting content from Japan and in Japanese). Also, this is just one of many actions they have been taking to stop the leaks, but this is one of the few times we can confirm they are also targeting social media accounts that post leaked content.

Shueisha’s Crusade Against Leakers

Chapters Are Usually “Out” Before The Official Release

Leaks have been one of the biggest headaches for Shonen Jump in the past few years regarding pirate content. Shueisha has been working on making Jump titles internationally available with platforms like Manga Plus in order to fight against pirated copies that circulate online. Some claim piracy is mostly a “service issue”, so the best way to fight it is to offer a better service to compete with it, and that seems to be the way Shueisha mostly tries to tackle this issue.

However, when chapters started to get officially released as soon as the magazine is out in Japan (and are available for free, at least for a time), leakers became the biggest issue for the magazine. Some people are able to access chapters a few days before they are out, and then post them online (and once they’re available, scanlators translate them quickly, before the official version is out). For this to work, it seems likely people inside the industry are leaking chapters, but it could be many people that are involved within the operation chain of the magazine.

Last February, two people were arrested for illegally distributing Shonen Jump copies, and thus allegedly infringing copyright law (since the copies were leaked). Japanese newspapers described them as “foreign nationals” and one of them presented themselves as Samir Musa. They supposedly bought the magazine before the release date at bookstores in Tokyo and photographed them, posting the “early leaks” online. If this is true, they were only customers at bookstores, though, and had access to the magazines simply by buying them (on the other hand, posting full content online seems more aligned with the standard definition of piracy). But this shows how worried Shueisha is about the leakers.

For the magazine to be out on Mondays across the whole country, it needs to be delivered earlier to stores, and some people are able to buy it beforehand. As it involves too many people (and too many bookstores), this honestly seems like a hard issue to tackle. Asking courts to take down or identify accounts might discourage some, but this kind of approach usually doesn’t totally prevent the issue from happening. For now, leaks are still there every week, but let’s see how this will develop from now on.

Source: X (Formerly Twitter)

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