Last week, many Shueisha fans received copyright claims from an individual identifying himself as Shueisha. The copyright claims sent were over artwork, cosplays and GIFs of Shueisha’s products such as Dragon ball, One Piece, etc. Even a contractor who previously worked on Dragon Ball with Shueisha received a DMCA notice on their Twitter account. This also gained them a copyright strike on their account.

Shueisha released a statement on the Mangaplus website :

“It has come to our attention, Shueisha ,falsely misrepresented by an individual sending copyright and removal requests on Twitter and other social media platforms. Shueisha is currently consulting with the various platforms to investigate what measures to taken to address this issue.”

These posts were safe from copyright claims under the new laws of the Japanese Government, in effect from 1 January, 2021. DMCA ( Digital Millennium Copyright Act), a U.S. based law for digital platforms, in use by many english-based sites such as Twitter, Youtube, etc. The copyright claims submitted were, in bad faith, as the information submitted about the company was wrong. This can put the submitter in some big trouble. For now, there is no cofirmation on the name of the individual in question.

Source : Mangaplus, Hisashi Sasaki Twitter.