But why? There was far more than just porn on there and it was easy way for smut artists to have a reading gallery
I mean my theory is that Fakku is involved with getting this shut down tbh.
Sounds more likely than the Japanese government doing something good for once by shutting down these dens of crypto-pedophilia, or at least forcing Exhentai to permanently remove lolicon/shotacon galleries and delete that data. Fakku leveraging their official access to certain doujinshi works, and the creators themselves, still requires a large monetary threat via legal action, so I'm not ruling out other possibilities.
I have a friend who uses it exclusively to view old JRPG artbooks.
That would be pretty hard to pull off in the USA, and Japanese laws are even more lax.
Exactly. Laws in certain European countries + the EU are more permissive of this kind of takedown, but certainly not in the U.S. or Japan. Individual artists, as well as doujinshi circles and distributors, have found workarounds to protect their IPs and latest releases as much as possible...Fakku being a major player for English audiences.
Japan doesn't care about that, Rurouni Kenshin author got off with a slap on the wrist for possessing actual physical media of what you're talking about, meanwhile Pierre Taki is blacklisted from the industry and cops are begging for people to stop liking his social media posts over getting caught doing cocaine.
