When Hollywood and Tokyo Sign, They Skip the Pipes
On April 10, 2026, at the Motion Picture Association's Washington headquarters, CODA Representative Director Takero Goto and MPA Chief Content Protection Officer Larissa L. Knapp signed the sixth renewal of an anti-piracy memorandum first inked in March 2014. The framework commits both sides to "further strengthening cooperation in combating online copyright infringement," with primary emphasis on joint enforcement across the Asia-Pacific region — building on what CODA describes as tens of thousands of prior enforcement actions.
What is striking is not the renewal, which has become routine, but what the new MOU does not contain. Four months earlier, on December 18, 2025, the Paris Judicial Court ordered five major VPN providers — Proton, NordVPN, CyberGhost, Surfshark, and ExpressVPN — to block thirteen pirate sports-streaming domains at the request of France's Ligue de Football Professionnel, with the regulator ARCOM empowered to add domains dynamically through the 2025/2026 football season. The CODA-MPA pact deliberately stays on the side of the line where most of the world's copyright industries lived a decade ago: notice-and-takedown, site-level enforcement, and automated content monitoring. It does not reach for the pipes.
The Strongest Case for Going After VPNs
Before dismissing the French approach, it is worth taking it seriously. Japan's online piracy losses are not theoretical. Industry estimates compiled by Japanese rights holders put publishing-and-film losses at roughly ¥500 billion in 2019 and nearly ¥2 trillion (about $13.2 billion) by 2022 — driven by overseas-hosted manga aggregators that proliferate faster than enforcement can chase them. The 2018 Mangamura shutdown removed a single site that had been attracting more than 100 million hits per month. When proxies and mirrors metastasise, the network layer is often the only choke point that consistently still works. France's court argued, defensibly, that confining a blocking order to specific domains for a defined season is not a "general monitoring obligation" of the kind banned by the EU Digital Services Act, and that VPN providers — classed as "technical intermediaries" under the French Sports Code — cannot use their no-log contracts with users to shrug off targeted relief.
That is a coherent position. It is also why every rights holder watching the LFP case is now asking whether the same lever could be pulled at home.
Why Japan Cannot — and Should Not — Pull That Lever
Tokyo has been here before, and its answer has held up. After the Mangamura shock, the Cabinet convened a government panel in 2018 to study legislated site-blocking. The panel suspended its work in October of that year because it could not reconcile the proposal with Article 21(2) of the Japanese Constitution, which guarantees secrecy of communications, and Article 4 of the Telecommunications Business Act, which operationalises that guarantee. To know whether a subscriber is reaching a blocked site, an ISP must inspect their traffic — and that inspection itself is the constitutional problem.
VPN providers in Japan operate under the same logic. There is no registration requirement, no licensing regime, no traffic-shaping mandate, and no legal duty to act as a copyright filter. Freedom House's 2024 country report records no government-directed blocking of VPN services in Japan. The MOU just signed in Washington does not disturb any of that. It commits CODA and the MPA to more of what has been working: cross-border takedown coordination, support for Asia-Pacific enforcement bodies (CODA's new Vietnam Center launched in April 2026), and the algorithmic crawling run out of CODA's Automated Contents Monitoring Center.
The Boring Stuff is Doing Most of the Work
The case for keeping the framework narrow is empirical, not just constitutional. Between January 2005 and March 2023, CODA-MPA joint enforcement produced roughly 13,820 cases and 304 arrests in China, 1,318 cases and 1,275 arrests in Hong Kong, and 2,215 operations with 2,233 arrests in Taiwan. CODA's takedown compliance rate across YouTube, Facebook, Daily Motion, and MEGA has run above 99% — with MEGA itself reportedly delivering 100% removal of every flagged item. None of this required reclassifying privacy tools as enforcement infrastructure.
This is the underrated story of modern copyright enforcement. The unglamorous combination of platform notice-and-takedown, automated detection, and targeted criminal referrals against site operators has scaled into the tens of thousands of actions across the region. It is not perfect — overseas-hosted aggregators still recur — but it has bent the curve without forcing any country to legislate around the architecture of the open internet.
The Right Lesson From Paris
The French ruling will be tested on appeal, and NordVPN has already filed. Regardless of the outcome, Tokyo's choice to keep its strongest international anti-piracy framework pointed at sites and platforms — rather than at the privacy intermediaries that millions of Japanese users rely on for routine security, remote work, and access to overseas services — is the proportionate one. It targets the actor that is actually infringing, not the neutral conduit that some infringers happen to use.
The right benchmark for an anti-piracy regime is not how many tools it conscripts, but how many infringing operations it actually shutters per yen spent without collateral damage to lawful users. By that measure, the renewed CODA-MPA framework is doing more for rights holders than France's VPN order ever will — and doing it without rewriting the rulebook on communications privacy.