ICv2 reported this to Anime News Network:
The article on Sojitz and ADV you refer to was one of several contingency articles we prepared and posted on a staging site…. It’s unfortunate because as this is written, the article isn’t true. It may still be one of several possible outcomes of the current situation, but as far as we know today ADV has not sent a notice to its retailers or placed the titles in question on hiatus and may not, pending the outcome of events that are still unfolding. We regret that our efforts to prepare for any eventuality led to this draft article becoming public before it was published and have taken steps to prevent such an event from happening again.
So this muddies the water of what exactly is going on even more. ADV still declines to comment on the situation.
3 Comments
lol contingency article
This does not explain why this specific contingency article was exposed.
Author - the ANN article explains that. I just cut out the most relevant part of the quote.
How it was exposed was that it was on ICv2’s staging web server - basically a place where they test webpages before actually making them public. However, google apparently was able to crawl the staging server and grab it.
So the answer was that the page was never officially “public” but it was public in the sense that it was on a server on the world wide web - just one that no one was supposed to know about. However, the google spider knew about it and cached it.