35-year-old plaintiff to force 2ch founder Hiroyuki into bankruptcy!

The axe may indeed fall on Hiroyuki, though 2ch itself is unlikely to actually change hands. ZAKZAK reports that the man who filed to seize Hiroyuki assets has decided to file to force Hiroyuki into bankruptcy. This is a move that was taken by shareholders of Kinmirai Tsushin Co. recently when cmopany officials tried to flee with their money, and it works:

Kinmirai Tsuushin is suspected of defrauding some 3,000 individual and corporate investors of 40 billion yen by promising to pay lucrative dividends on the basis of its nonexistent Internet telephony operations.

The Metropolitan Police Department began questioning former Kinmirai Tsuushin executives earlier this week over the alleged fraud, investigative sources said. Ishii is now abroad, they said.

On Dec. 7, a real estate company, one of the 3,000 investors, asked the court to declare Kinmirai Tsuushin bankrupt. The real estate company had invested 55 million yen in response to Kinmirai Tsuushin’s solicitation of investments.

The plaintiff noted that he only decided to go forward with this action because the initial reports on Jan 12 of his moves against Hiroyuki sparked further harassment from 2ch readers.

Depending on how things work out, Hiroyuki’s irresponsibility may cause a major disruption in the regular functioning of the Japanese Internet culture. Not that I feel that bad — though it’s a great site in many respects, 2ch is, as Joe just noted, the best example of what happens when the Internet Fuckwad effect goes unchecked for almost 10 years.

But it looks like he is helping pioneer new ways of making the court system effective against harassment campaigns. Meanwhile, there’s more activity on the 2ch site than ever before, and angry 2channelers have been swinging wildly at people who have sued Hiroyuki, such as American-born activist Arudo Debito.

3 thoughts on “35-year-old plaintiff to force 2ch founder Hiroyuki into bankruptcy!”

  1. The big advantage of bankruptcy seems to be that criminal charges are available if Hiroyuki doesn’t cooperate. That’s the real problem being showcased by these lawsuits: for a garden-variety tort or contract case, Japanese courts have no power to order the defendant to do anything.

    Also interesting to note that one dude is pressing charges against a 2ch poster under Japan’s criminal libel statute. (Hat tip to Debito’s blog for that one.) Now the police may have a better excuse to stick their nose into 2ch and Hiroyuki’s affairs.

    Important to note: Hiroyuki doesn’t actually own the servers (as far as anyone can tell). The biggest risk I can foresee would be if he couldn’t pay the hosting bills any more, which would take 2ch offline assuming the hosting company didn’t want to provide all that bandwidth for free.

    But I could imagine some company buying 2ch to capitalize on that huge userbase…

  2. Alexa statistics are notoriously questionable, considering they are based on a voluntarily installed client program. And since Alexa is mainly in English, I think it is safe to assume their statistics in foreign languages are less reliable. On the other hand, we don’t have any BETTER source of impartial web stats.

Comments are closed.