The Tokyo headquarters of Hitotsubashi Group, including Shueisha. Photo Credit: Los688
A federal judge has set clear-cut limits on DMCA subpoenas – at least when it comes to ascertaining alleged infringers’ identities en route to spearheading litigation in foreign countries.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas S. Hixson signed off on the corresponding order closer to February’s beginning, and the development started making a delayed media splash (first in manga and comic circles) a little while thereafter.
Letting primary documents take the wheel for a moment, manga giant Shueisha last June slapped Cloudflare with a DMCA subpoena request. Filing in a California federal court, the Tokyo-based Shōnen Jump publisher specifically moved to determine the individual owner of two (later decommissioned) sites, Mangajikan and Alammanga, that were allegedly hosting protected media without permission.
Unsurprisingly, the push didn’t sit right with this owner, who’s based outside the U.S. and attempted to quash the subpoena (or, alternatively, conceal his or her identity with a protective order). Besides claiming fair use, the individual emphasized that the domains were “registered and operated entirely outside the U.S.” and had blocked stateside users altogether.
“U.S. courts lack jurisdiction over purely foreign conduct,” the non-party added for good measure.
Keeping things moving along here – there are, of course, plenty of other bases we could cover if so inclined – mid-October saw the district (not magistrate) judge deny the quash motion and call on the parties to submit the proposed protective order.
Back to the magistrate judge’s aforementioned determination, then, Judge Hixson simply modified and signed off on Shueisha’s protective order.
Regarding the most noteworthy of the modifications, the judge did away with a line that would’ve enabled the filing party to use protected information when levying “a copyright infringement action in a foreign court.”
In other words, the court denied Shueisha’s attempt to utilize the subpoenaed identification details to spearhead a related complaint in Japan.
“[O]nly U.S.-based copyright claims are within the purpose of the subpoena,” Judge Hixson elaborated. “Foreign litigation is outside of that scope. Thus, Shuesisha’s proposal that it could use protected information to file a copyright action in a foreign court is rejected.”
Also nixed from the order: A section that would have seen “all protections under this order cease” if a full-scale complaint was filed.
“Second, filing a U.S.-based copyright claim does not cause the protections of the protective order to evaporate,” Judge Hixson noted. “They remain in place; otherwise, Shueisha’s attestation was false.”
Here, the court’s position isn’t necessarily a huge setback for Shueisha given the option to litigate in Japan; it was only in late 2025 that a Tokyo court ordered Cloudflare to pay over $3.2 million to Shueisha and others for hosting allegedly infringing sites.
But as mentioned – and especially as an ugly infringement suit is in full swing against as-yet-unidentified international defendants – the order could prove significant in different legal battles moving forward.
