What is Tachiyomi?

Tachiyomi is an open-source Android app used for reading manga, webtoons, and more. It allows reading the content from local storage, while also having extensions from which you can load the content, download it for offline use, and check for updates on a timer or whenever the user wants to. You could get those extensions either from the Extensions page in the app, or download them online and install them yourself.

Why it’s joever?

The problem started when Kakao Entertainment, a publishing company, decided that, in their own words:

“Tachiyomi, under the guise of ‘legitimate’ open-source development, has been seriously infringing on the copyright of manhwas worldwide”

Now, that is just stupid. Tachiyomi is a reader, plain and simple. It does NOT host the content, nor redistributes it. It does support extensions and had an extensions list page, with which you can get content from other websites/sources, but for each extension, you would download and install a separate component (apk) that integrates with the reader so you can have a better reading experience.

Now, whether those extensions get their content from legitimate sources or not, is another question, and it has nothing to do with Tachiyomi.

That would be like saying "Chromium, under the guise of 'legitimate' open-source development, has been seriously infringing on the copyright of everything worldwide" because you can use it with different “extensions” or in this case Search Engines to look for illegal copies of content. And I think we can all agree on how stupid that sounds.

But they decided that a proper response to Tachiyomi is finding personal details of the involved individuals, and proceeding with strong legal and institutional responses against them and over 100 forked GitHub pages.

The developer’s response to a multi-billion dollar company and their lawyers was to update the app and remove the extension list. This means the user would still be able to install extensions, but they would have to search for them online.

When I saw that, I was a bit sad, but I understood where the developers were coming from, and that while none of this was their fault, they did it so that they didn’t have to fight a legal battle. But it did make me angry at Kakao Entertainment.

But what made me actually fume with anger was that it wasn’t enough for them.

Even after Tachiyomi removed the extensions list, Kakao Entertainment still sent them legal notices. So in the end Tachiyomi developers decided to stop the development of it. And I can’t fault them. As I’ve said before, going against a multi-billion dollar company and their lawyers is unimaginably hard, practically impossible.

And all of this means that Kakao Entertainment won. Even though they didn’t have any kind of a legal case. All because they had something actually powerful, billions of dollars and lawyers ready to spend them.

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On a lighter note, if you wanna have a laugh read this Chat GPT rendition of my blog after I asked it to check for gramatical errors click here.

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Link to Tachiyomi
Their extensions removal post
Their goodbye post