A famous case in which a user requested a post be deleted, but went to court was in the “Tsumini-nureta-futari (the title of a manga)” case. In this case, the publishers of a magazine found that an interview that was published in their magazine had been posted on the internet by somebody. A user had typed in the entire interview by hand, and posted it. After finding out about the array of posts, the publishers requested 2ch to remove the posts; however 2ch refused to do so, reasoning that the publishers did not follow the method specified on the delete policy and sending them a e-mail message that merely said to “send such requests to the removal request board.” After acknowledging that 2ch would not delete the posts, the publishers sued 2ch stating that 2ch was helping copyright infringement.
The court judged that even though the publishers did not follow the rules posted on 2ch, the owner was able to acknowledge that copyright infringement was taking place, and immediately delete the relevant posts. The court ruled that the damages were about 1200,000 yen in total.
One of the characteristics of this case is that, the court ruled that the responsibility for removing the infringing posts were generated on the instant that 2ch received the request from the publishers. Although this is one of the first cases that were judge after the implementation of the new law, there have been pasts cases ruling that responsibility arises a few days after the original request is sent in, taking into consideration that the owners of such internet forums cannot easily judge if the posts really are infringing without doing further investigation. It is said that the court ruled this way because the content that was posted on the internet was a portion from a weekly magazine which was targeted at a relatively small number of anime “manias,” and thus, the infringing posts had a crucial damage on the number of sales of the book. Furthermore, unlike defamatory posts, in the case of copyright infringement, it is easy to confirm if a post is copying the original post of another person, and thus, the court ruled this way.