On August 2, 2019, Exhentai relaunched after its servers relocated to Moldova. 24 hours' notice was given for the shutdown of Exhentai, leading users on the image board 4chan to attempt to archive the entire site before it closed on July 27. Vice speculated that the shutdown was in reaction to the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market adopted by the European Union in June 2019, which makes digital platforms legally liable for material posted by users that violates copyright, as well as a July 2019 proposal by Dutch Minister of Justice Ferdinand Grapperhaus to impose harsher punishments on websites that do not rapidly remove child pornography. On July 26, 2019, E-Hentai and Exhentai announced that both sites would shut down in response to "recent legislative changes in the Netherlands", where the servers of the sites were hosted at the time. In June 2019, both sites were removed from Google, per the company's policy of de-listing websites that violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Access to Exhentai requires an existing E-Hentai account for individuals without an account, Exhentai appears as a blank page with an illustration of a crying panda, and has consequently has earned the nickname "Sad Panda" among users of the site. Existing galleries containing this content were deleted from the site, amounting to the removal of approximately 30,000 of the website's 150,000 galleries this content was later spun off onto Exhentai, a sister site to E-Hentai. On March 27, 2010, E-Hentai announced that in response to pressure from advertisers, it would no longer host artwork depicting underage characters ( lolicon and shotacon) and bestiality. net domain lapsed and was purchased by another party. org domain in 2005 after ownership of its. net domain in 2001 before moving to its current.
Its sister site Exhentai (colloquially known as Sad Panda) was spun off from E-Hentai in 2010 to host artwork that depicts material that is illegal in certain jurisdictions, such as lolicon, shotacon, and bestiality.Į-Hentai launched as a Yahoo! Group on July 1, 1999. The site hosts user-generated image galleries primarily of pornographic content originating or derived from anime, manga, and video games, such as fanart, scanlations of manga and dōjinshi, and cosplay photographs. The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls it a "controversial proposal to make virtually every online community, service, and platform legally liable for any infringing material posted by their users, even very briefly, even if there was no conceivable way for the online service provider to know that a copyright infringement had taken place.E-Hentai is an image-hosting and file-sharing website focused on hentai (Japanese cartoon pornography). This law is designed limit how copyrighted content is shared online, but critics say the directive-specifically, Articles 11 and 13-are a disaster for internet freedoms. While it's not clear what law they're referring to, specifically, it's possibly the European Union Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which the European Parliament voted into law in April 2019. "While it may have been possible to move the necessary servers to some other country with more lenient laws, at this point in time it's probably a game of whack-a-mole, so even if I wanted to attempt it, the aforementioned tendon injury makes it impossible for me to play that game."
"Unfortunately, recent legislative changes in the Netherlands, confirmed by our host, has made it impossible to keep the status quo going," Tenboro wrote in a post to the e-hentai forums on Friday.