Request for Deletion of Bulletin Board on FC2 Server and Disclosure of IP Address

FC2 is a company that provides internet services, including hosting services. Among them, “FC2 Blog” is known as a service that boasts a top-class number of users among the many blog services in Japan.

Our firm has successfully filed a provisional disposition and realized the deletion and IP address disclosure request for a bulletin board site operated on a server managed by FC2. We will introduce the actual flow leading to the deletion of posts and IP address disclosure on FC2 here.

Who Should You Make a Request To?

When dealing with posts on an online bulletin board, where it’s unclear who is operating it, you may face the issue of “who should I make a request to?” when seeking to have a post removed or to request the disclosure of the poster’s IP address. If you know who the operator is, you can make a request to them. However, in the case of a bulletin board that is operated anonymously and the operator is unknown, it’s not immediately clear who you should make a request to. If you don’t know who to make a request to, you won’t be able to request the disclosure of the IP address, making it impossible to identify the poster, and you may not even be able to have the post removed. So, should you give up on requesting the removal or disclosure of the IP address for such anonymously operated bulletin boards?

In such cases, there is the option of making a removal or IP address disclosure request to the server administrator. In other words, you can make a disclosure request to the server operator who is hosting the bulletin board website itself, asking them to “remove the page where illegal defamation is taking place on the bulletin board site your company is hosting” or “disclose the IP address of the person who made the post”. Regarding the latter, a unique access log is left on the server when a post is made to the bulletin board. The server operator can check this access log to investigate which IP address the bulletin board post came from. Then, if you can get the IP address disclosed from the server operator, you can identify the poster from there.

How to Investigate the Server Hosting a Site

So, how can you investigate which server a particular site is hosted on? For this investigation, you can use a web service called “aguse”. By entering the site’s URL on aguse and clicking “Search”, you can find out where the site is hosted. For example, the result of investigating the URL of the Monolith Law Office’s site is as follows.

From this information, it can be understood that the site of Monolith Law Office is hosted on a server managed by “SAKURA Internet Inc.”. Similarly, for FC2, you can investigate the server operator hosting the site.

Dealing with FC2, an Overseas Corporation

However, the issue arises after this. FC2, Inc. is an overseas corporation. Therefore, the first problem is how to obtain the corporate registration of FC2. When conducting provisional dispositions or lawsuits, it is necessary to submit the corporate registration of the corporation in question to the court. While you can obtain registration for domestic corporations at the Legal Affairs Bureau in Japan, for overseas corporations, you must obtain registration in a different way for each country or state. In the case of FC2, it is a corporation in the state of Nevada (Las Vegas) in the United States, so you need to use the Nevada corporate registration system to obtain registration data.

Furthermore, there is the question of whether it is possible to conduct provisional dispositions or lawsuits against an overseas corporation in a court in Japan. This is a problem referred to in technical terms as “international jurisdiction”. In conclusion, operators who provide services in Japanese for Japanese people are considered “those who conduct business in Japan”, and lawsuits against such operators are recognized as having international jurisdiction under Article 3-3, Paragraph 5 of the Japanese Civil Procedure Law (“Japanese Civil Procedure Law”) as “claims related to business in Japan”. Moreover, if this is the case, provisional dispositions against such operators are also recognized as having international jurisdiction under Article 11 of the Japanese Civil Preservation Law (“Japanese Civil Preservation Law”) when “a lawsuit can be filed in a Japanese court”.

Procedure for Provisional Disposition Against FC2

Once these issues are cleared, you can file a provisional disposition to request the deletion and disclosure of IP addresses with FC2 as the defendant. However, in this provisional disposition, you need to prepare English translations of documents and evidence, so the difficulty level is higher compared to when dealing with a corporation within Japan.

If the content of the post is recognized as illegal in the provisional disposition, you can obtain a decision (similar to a judgment in a lawsuit) that approves the deletion and request for disclosure of the IP address. If you send this decision to the management of FC2, the article in question will be deleted, and the IP address will also be disclosed. This is how the system works.

https://monolith.law/reputation/provider-liability-limitation-law (ja)

Afterwards, based on the disclosed IP address, you make a request for disclosure of sender information and identify the poster. Then, based on this information, you initiate a lawsuit to claim damages, etc. against the sender.

https://monolith.law/reputation/disclosure-of-the-senders-information (ja)

In this way, our firm has successfully requested the deletion of bulletin boards operated on servers hosted by FC2 and the disclosure of IP addresses. If you are considering requesting deletion or identifying posters against foreign corporations like FC2, we recommend consulting with a lawyer who has specialized knowledge.