Mangadex gets hit by DMCA - more than 25% of chapters gone | staff FAQ update

[panzerkampfwagyu]

🤷‍♂️ It'll be one of two things. No visible change or MD is shut down. NamiComi has no reason to turn MD into a copy of its own site. Seeing that NC and MD have been involved with each other in some form for years, I'm leaning more towards the former.

I mean, you have a point with the fact that Mangadex becoming NamiComi 2 would be rather redundant, as NamiComi already hosts all that content of self-published comics. However, the lack of an official plan on how to proceed paired with basic pattern recognition doesn't bode well at all for this anyway.



Imo, the site team should properly communicate what the plan from now is, as most of the debates and doomsaying comes from the fact that they have not given any official statement on this, but made changes without communicating them properly.

 

[Togelic]

To me the FAQ and new policies really read less like some new thing and more like clarification of how the site has been for a long time, since they sound more or less like how things have always been. I think cracking down on paywalled scanlations and having a closer relationship with NamiComi are the only new things they've done recently.

 

[xaml]

I luckily wrote my favorite mangas in Google Docs...

Worst part of these DMCA strikes is that it is almost impossible to read it "officially". They block everyone not from Japan, blocking foreign payment methods.

But hey, don't you dare to read it free on somewhere on the internet.

 

[kn4ll]

I luckily wrote my favorite mangas in Google Docs...

Worst part of these DMCA strikes is that it is almost impossible to read it "officially". They block everyone not from Japan, blocking foreign payment methods.

But hey, don't you dare to read it free on somewhere on the internet.

I have no issues paying for bookwalker and kobo. The only thing I can think of is that they won't let you buy magazines older than three months without a VPN. I don't know why.

 

[Valle_reading_manga]

Shout out to the previous administration for essentially ghosting everyone.

There was no change of staff (or at least not that I'm aware of)
The FAQ was almost certainly made by the same people who have been, are still and will be working on MD.
While this is just my speculation, I assume the change pretty much only concerns legal/organisational stuff like infra ownership/bills, domain ownership, ...
Obviously, this means MD will have to comply with future DMCAs so we'll have to hope not every publisher is as shortsighted as the ones that participated in the recent nuke...

 

[BestBoy]

Now when uploading you have to mark a checkbox that you have permission of the publisher to upload the manga and if anything happens the responsability is all on you, it's one of the reasons many groups are jumping ship lol

I don't think that's a policy change. From what I know It's been on their content policy page. But even if it was new it doesn't really change anything anyway. It reads to me as legal jargon crafted from Section 230.

lack of communication

I think more communication would be good, but adding Content Policy 2.2 to the upload page has apparently been in the works for a while now. But 3-ish days to get a FAQ out while attempting to remove 7000 titles is pretty quick, honestly.

added a content policy a couple of days ago

Your web archive link doesn't work.

doubt that "content creators" = scanlators

Well, they refer to groups like utoon, asura, rezo, ez manga, reset, etc. paywalling chapters in the next point and call them content creators. Also, it doesn't make any sense for it to refer to anything else. Probably just avoiding using the term "scanlator" in their official content policy that lawyers will read.

Here's some good news I heard through the grapevine earlier, the folks in charge of the Dekai Manga Archive were about 93% complete with archiving MD and expect to only be missing 60k chapters our of the 660k. Last archive was 2020 and the new one has not been released yet. Keep an eye out for it though.

how to proceed paired

Proceed for who? Readers and scanlators should always have backup options since takedowns are the nature of piracy. If you're a reader, backup your follow list to mangaupdates or MAL or anilist so you can find the scanlators again. If you're a scanlator, you should have had backups of your files and backup release options already (cubari, hosted on your own site, etc.)

without communicating them properly

I'm not sure which changes you're referring to.

 

[bondejeger]

Your web archive link doesn't work.

That’s on your end.

 

[Valle_reading_manga]

Updated the initial post to reflect my thoughts / conclusions based on the official DMCA FAQ which might've arguably resulted in even more questions and thus speculation than answers.
Call it cope, but I'm cautiously optimistic this was a step towards long-term sustainability of the site, albeit most likely in a lighter version (content-wise). Exactly how much weight we have to cut, the future will show...

 

[Valle_reading_manga]

Here's some good news I heard through the grapevine earlier, the folks in charge of the Dekai Manga Archive were about 93% complete with archiving MD and expect to only be missing 60k chapters our of the 660k.

Well for what it's worth there were some 2,5 million chapters prior to the DMCAs. So unless they have some mysterious precognition ability that allowed them to only backup the relevant chapters, they missed the MD archival target by quite a bit...

 

[BakedBanana]

That’s on your end.

When I check out the archives, this shows up:

Is this supposed to happen?

 

[BestBoy]

That’s on your end.

No silly, the wayback snapshots you're linking to don't work. Obviously the link itself works.

 

[BestBoy]

snip

I'll just post their announcement so there's no confusion.:


Update - March 2025: Work on the next DMA release is in progress. It will probably be a Fall 2025™ release:

Update - May 2025: We are aware of the MangaDex DMCA takedowns. Most of the deleted chapters have already been archived, unfortunately we estimate about 30-40k are lost*. Presumably, the MD API will allow to identify these chapters and if so, then we’ll provide a full list of the missing chapters. It is possible that at least some of the deleted chapters are in the DMA 2020 archive, so perhaps at least some of the older chapters may be recovered. We’ll update this page once we know more.

*Clarification to our update from yesterday: We indexed all chapters with an english translation in January 2025, which is our reference point. The approx. “40k lost chapters” are referring to our index from January. Since then, there have of course been new uploads which have not yet even made it into our database. *

 

[MemoryIris]

When I check out the archives, this shows up:

Is this supposed to happen?

No silly, the wayback snapshots you're linking to don't work. Obviously the link itself works.

From what I understand, seeing the actual snapshot is irrelevant. The whole point is that 17 may 2025 is the earliest date, so as far as anyone can tell these are new rules that popped up in the middle of this whole thing.

 

[Jordick]

Welp, that's the end of MD I guess, because how do you even recover from ~7000 series getting removed. =/

 

[BestBoy]

The whole point is that 17 may 2025 is the earliest date

I see, so the question isn't specifically the existence of the content policy prior to Saturday's release, but the entire compliance page. Looking at some snapshots on archive.today it does appear that the Terms & Policies page was not in the sidebar where it's found now as recently as 4/4/2025 (https://archive.vn/dFwog). The Privacy Policy page did exist as it's own page for the entirety of 2023 (https://archive.vn/https://mangadex.org/privacy). Which matches along with it not being update since 2022.

No idea where it went for 2024 and 2025. I guess they moved it to the compliance page before going live with it, which may mean creating the compliance page has been something they've been working on for longer than the DMCAs have been a thing.

I can't say for certain that some of these other sections in the compliance page weren't being kept elsewhere as well.

My take on the actual inclusion of the "permission" content policy on uploading, is that it matches along with one of the rules that's been around since 2022 and is just there to satisfy an exemption that may or may not exist. Upload Restrictions 2.1 (now Content Restriction 1.2) mentions that uploading official releases is not allowed, unless with an exemption. One of which is permission granted from the publisher. The language of Upload Restrictions from 2022 and Content Restrictions from today implies that "official release" refers to both the official translation and the "raw"

The 2022 rule page was changed to the current one in 2023 (https://archive.vn/5qH5r#selection-713.17-713.336)


tl;dr
I think the content policy thing is probably nothing. Just a, "you have permission, right? wink wink nudge nudge.," kinda thing that isn't gonna be used (like before). I doubt all the chapters that got uploaded today had permission.

I think the compliance page is just their official legal framework that they finally finished putting together, since they had part of it in the form of the Privacy Policy before.

 

[BestBoy]

Welp, that's the end of MD I guess, because how do you even recover from ~7000 series getting removed. =/

Well, if they continue along as they have for the past 7-ish years, they'll have like 100k uploaded manga series? I think I saw they were at 57k series on MD in English by itself.

 

[bondejeger]

From what I understand, seeing the actual snapshot is irrelevant. The whole point is that 17 may 2025 is the earliest date, so as far as anyone can tell these are new rules that popped up in the middle of this whole thing.

Yeah, it feels like we’re being gaslighted into believing it’s something that’s always been there.

 

[kn4ll]

tl;dr
I think the content policy thing is probably nothing. Just a, "you have permission, right? wink wink nudge nudge.," kinda thing that isn't gonna be used (like before). I doubt all the chapters that got uploaded today had permission.

I think the compliance page is just their official legal framework that they finally finished putting together, since they had part of it in the form of the Privacy Policy before.

The issue is that it feels like we're getting thrown under the bus for mangadex to protect themselves.

 

[hahanaho]

The issue is that it feels like we're getting thrown under the bus for mangadex to protect themselves.

It'd be hilarious if a bunch of scanlators and manga readers pirates go to jail because of this. The only ones that are safe will those based in certain countries. For example, those shady manhwa "scanlators" look like Chinese outfits based in China. Based on their "translations" and my interaction with them. Hell, probably state-supported to screw with manhwa/manga industry.

 

[kn4ll]

It'd be hilarious if a bunch of scanlators and manga readers pirates go to jail because of this. The only ones that are safe will those based in certain countries. For example, those shady manhwa "scanlators" look like Chinese outfits based in China. Based on their "translations" and my interaction with them. Hell, probably state-supported to screw with manhwa/manga industry.

No sane person is going to fight the DMCA claim.