NHentai


nHentai is an adult-oriented website that hosts scanned and translated hentai and dōjinshi manga which was launched in 2014. The website received about 80 million page visits in June 2024. It was formerly operated anonymously.

History

The domain nhentai.net was registered on 26 June 2014, providing a free, index-based catalogue of hentai works in multiple languages.
Between 2015 and 2020, the website's system of assigning a unique six-digit ID to every gallery URL gave rise to the internet slang term "the numbers", where users would share six-digit strings to covertly link to specific pornographic comics on social media platforms that banned direct adult links.
For the first decade of its operation, the site's administration remained entirely anonymous, utilizing Cloudflare services to mask the server's origin and avoiding direct legal confrontation until the PCR Distributing lawsuit filed in late 2024.

Content

nHentai’s library is organised by six-digit gallery identifiers and tags that cover artists, characters, series and sexual themes. Users can create free accounts to bookmark favourites, post comments and generate personalised recommendations. The site does not accept direct user uploads; instead, its operators automatically curate and host the material themselves.
nHentai is best described as a mirror site and curator rather than a user-upload platform. nHentai replicates portions of ExHentai’s catalogue. Specialised web crawlers copy gallery archives and metadata from repositories such as ExHentai and Hitomi.la; the operators then assign six-digit IDs and host the images on their own CDN sub-domains. Because every file is stored locally, nHentai does not claim DMCA safe harbor status; an argument highlighted by PCR Distributing in its 2024 U.S. complaint.

Lawsuits

In July 2024, J18 Publishing sought a subpoena under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to compel Cloudflare, an infrastructure provider for nHentai, to disclose the site operator's identity. nHentai’s lawyers argued the request was invalid, as Cloudflare merely transmitted data and has never stored site content. The court ultimately halted the subpoena.
In August 2024, California-based publisher PCR Distributing filed a federal lawsuit against nHentai in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, alleging direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. TorrentFreak reported that the plaintiff seeks domain transfer or nationwide blocking of nhentai.net and claims the site is ineligible for DMCA safe-harbour protections because it hosts, rather than merely links to, infringing files.
In October 2024, nHentais lawyers filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that PCR had previously invited the site to carry its material and even proposed advertising partnerships.
nHentai requested a premature dismissal of the lawsuit in January 2025, arguing that PCR's claimed ownership of JAST USA was dubious, that copyright protection of "literary works" do not apply to the site's hosted images, and that some of its content had been uploaded on the website before the work's copyright was legally registered. In April, the request was denied and, at the court's orders, nHentai's owners identified themselves as X Separator LLC.
On 15 April 2025 a U.S. district judge affirmed a magistrate’s ruling that nHentais owners could not remain anonymous, ordering the defendants to reveal their identities and denying their motion to dismiss the suit. Two days later CyberNews reported that the entity behind the site had been identified in court filings as X Separator LLC.
On 26 November 2025, X Separator LLC filed an amended answer and counterclaims against PCR Distributing, alleging fraud and negligent misrepresentation. The filing asserts that PCR executives had explicitly granted written permission in 2020 for nHentai to host their content to drive sales through banner advertisements, stating at the time that they were "not interested in trying to fight any sites". X Separator alleges that PCR encouraged this collaboration for years and only began registering U.S. copyrights for the works in 2023. The counterclaim seeks damages exceeding $500,000, arguing that PCR's subsequent infringement lawsuit and DMCA subpoenas constituted a fraudulent reversal of their prior agreement.

Access

Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs announced in December 2024 that it would deploy an artificial intelligence crawler to locate pirate manga and anime sites. More than 1,000 pirate manga sites had been identified and that 70 % offered foreign-language scans.
Multiple unofficial mirrors use the nHentai interface or scrape its gallery IDs. The largest, nhentai.to, which appeared in May 2020 and was still online in 2025, was graded by the security website ConsumingTech as “relatively safe” but noted sporadic malware flags. The operators of these mirrors generally use automated scripts to scrape nHentai’s own image servers, meaning that takedowns applied to the original site often propagate only after a delay.

ISP blocking and filtering

The reachability of nhentai.net varies by jurisdiction, with several governments or regulators ordering ISPs to prevent access:
  • China – The domain is inaccessible from mainland China, being blocked by the Great Firewall as part of the country's broad censorship of pornography and unapproved foreign media.
  • France – OONI network-measurement data collected between July 2024 and April 2025 shows that nhentai.net returns the standard Ministry-of-the-Interior “illicit content” warning page on all french ISPs, confirming domain-level blocking.
  • India – A Department of Telecommunications order dated 29 September 2022 directed ISPs to block 63 pornographic domains; the public list published by India Today includes nhentai.net.
  • Indonesia – Under Kominfo Regulation 19/2014 the national “TrustPositif” filter blocks more than 1 million URLs classified as pornography. OONI confirms that nhentai.net was served a block page on at least nine Indonesian networks tested during 2023-25.
  • Malaysia – The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission blocks the domain as part of its enforcement against pornography under the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998; users are typically redirected to a government notice stating the site violates national laws.
  • South Korea – The Korea Communications Standards Commission blocks access to the site using SNI field monitoring. Since 2019, attempts to access the domain are redirected to a government warning page known as warning.or.kr.
  • United Arab Emirates – The Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority maintains a mandatory “prohibited content” catalogue that automatically blocks adult sites; nhentai.net is unreachable on Etisalat and Du without a VPN, as confirmed by TDRA’s public URL-testing portal.
  • Iran – The site is banned in Iran as part of the country's broad censorship over foreign and pornographic content and content deemed "immoral".