The Diet on Friday enacted a revised anti-online piracy law to tighten copyright control, banning illicit downloading of manga, magazines and academic texts, in addition to music and videos that were already covered by the existing legislation.
The law also regulates "leech websites" that provide users hyperlinks to download so-called torrent files of pirated materials. The ban on illegal downloading will take effect on Jan. 1 next year, while restrictions on leech sites will come into effect on Oct. 1.
The law revision came as the country saw a rising number of piracy and leech websites, notably the Mangamura site, which had over 100 million hits a month before being disabled in April 2018, causing an estimated loss of more than ¥300 billion ($2.75 billion) to publishers.