Largest Spanish-Language Manga Piracy Website Shut Down
2026 is proving to be an absolute "winter" for global manga piracy websites, with the largest, Bato.to, closing in January. The popular anime streaming piracy platform HiAnime followed suit in March. MangaDex and Mangajikan are both embroiled in legal disputes, with Mangajikan still battling Shueisha in court.
The latest website to be shut down is TuMangaOnline, also known as ZonaTMO. It was once one of the largest strongholds of Spanish-language manga piracy, with over 50 million visits in a single month in March 2026.
The Korea Copyright Overseas Promotion Association (COPA), representing Korean publishers such as Kakao and WEBTOON, previously conducted a months-long investigation with intellectual property investigation agency IP-House and a Spanish law firm. After gathering sufficient evidence, they handed the investigation results over to the Spanish authorities, who immediately took action against the website operators located in Almería. Ultimately, ZonaTMO and all associated piracy platform networks were completely eliminated.
For a long time, piracy has existed in a moral gray area, and this debate has once again brought this contradiction to the forefront. In many parts of the world, access to film and music is still uneven, and issues such as delayed releases, licensing barriers, and platform restrictions continue to plague ordinary viewers. For them, choosing piracy is often not intentional, but simply because there is no other way to access the content they want to see, or rather, to see the complete content.
Currently, online opinions on this matter are polarized. Some believe that piracy harms the income of creators, technicians, and artists who rely on legitimate compensation for their livelihoods. Others continue to defend these platforms, pointing out that limited access and high costs are precisely the reasons why viewers initially turned to piracy.