Sony Music Japan has indeed received subpoenas in US courts forcing the web company Cloudflare to reveal data it has related to a piracy site specializing in Japanese music.
The site in question, Hikari-no-Akari, has been around for over a decade and attracts over a million users each month. According to Torrentfreak, the online page offers links to illegal downloads of tracks, adding a series of recordings. owned by Sony Music Japan. Recently shared tracks include “Sayonara, Mata Itsuka!” via Kenshi Yonezu and “Peacekeeper” via Stereo Dive Foundation.
Hikari-no-Akari’s operations also become a personal forum and Discord server with strictly controlled membership, with the operators only occasionally opening them up to new members. The exclusivity of those platforms led one Reddit user to compare the server to “an interdimensional portal that only opens a secure planetary alignment. “
The piracy site uses Cloudflare’s facilities as part of its operations, prompting Sony to ask the company to remove links to illegal copies of its recordings last month. Cloudflare has long resisted efforts by the music industry to force it to proactively target piracy sites that use its platform, regularly responding only to court orders.
Through the subpoena, Sony hopes to download very important information about the American Hikari-no-Akari, adding their names, IP addresses and payment settings. This information would possibly form the basis of long-term legal action against the site’s operators. , as long as the record company downloads this information.