Streamer In Japan Gets 2 Years Jail Time For Uploading Let’s Plays, Anime Spoilers
from the bonkers dept
Long time Techdirt readers may recall the iterative changes that Japanese copyright laws have undergone over the course of the last several years. While they aren’t the only changes to have occurred, the topline summary was to turn copyright infringement from a predominantly civil law issue into a criminal one, particularly in cases that prosecutors can identify as not falling under the following provision in the Japanese constitution:
An act unavoidably performed to avert a present danger to the life, body, liberty or property of oneself or any other person is not punishable only when the harm produced by such act does not exceed the harm to be averted.
In other words, if you’re not avoiding more harm than you’re causing by committing copyright infringement, you have the potential to face years in prison if convicted, along with fines. All the more so, apparently, if you’re infringing on the manga or anime industry’s content.
And now these changes to the laws are having the real world effect of putting people in jail for the crime of the kind of copyright infringement that might not even lead to a conviction here in America. One man was just sentenced to 2 years in prison for uploading and monetizing some YouTube videos that were let’s plays and summaries of animes.
A Japanese court has convicted a man of violating copyright law after he uploaded gameplay and anime videos without publisher permission. Reported by Japanese paper Asahi Shimbun, the 53-year-old man, Shinobu Yoshida, was sentenced to two years in prison and assessed a 1 million yen fine (or about $6,700 USD.)
Yoshida was arrested in May of this year after uploading gameplay videos of the visual novel Steins;Gate: My Darling’s Embrace back in 2019. According to a press release from the Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), a Japanese anti-piracy trade group, the complaint apparently stemmed from the fact that Yoshida monetized the videos, which violated a Japanese law that prohibits making money off copyrighted material. Yoshida also uploaded videos summarizing episodes of the Spy × Family and Steins;Gate anime shows.
The differences between American copyright laws and Japanese laws are bonkers. As I stated in the opening, there is a very real chance that uploading let’s plays and anime summaries, even if those summaries used some footage from the anime, would fall under fair use protections. Less so with let’s plays, probably, but let’s plays are also generally permitted by a large portion of the video game industry, seeing them as doing more good than harm to those games in terms of interest in them and sales.
In the case of this man and what he uploaded, the main impetus for wanting him jailed appears mostly to be, spoiler alert, spoilers.
CODA characterized the complaint as “malicious cases of posting videos containing content and endings (spoilers) without permission from the rights holders, […] and unfairly gaining advertising revenue through copyright infringement.”
Asahi Shimbun reported that the prosecution stated Yoshida’s actions were, “a malicious act that tramples on the effort of content production.” They argued that because he uploaded videos that condensed and spoiled anime episodes and videos of gameplay from a visual novel — a style of game that focuses on reading to experience the story rather than through gameplay — consumers would be less incentivized to spend money on either. According to Shimbun, this is the first time such a conviction has occurred in Japan.
Spoilers got a man 2 years of jail time. Just let that sink in. And, yes, the source article does note that Yoshida acknowledged to the court that he knew his actions were violating the law when he did them… but so what? That doesn’t in any way change the notion that criminalizing copyright infringement in this way is absolutely absurd. And if the monetization was the key issue here, well, YouTube does provide a way for rightsholders to demonetize videos like these and even yoink the monetization for themselves.
All of that would be better than a man in his fifties rotting in jail for two years over some anime spoilers.
Filed Under: anime, copyright, criminal copyright, japan, let's play, shinobu yoshida, spoilers, steins;gate
Comments on “Streamer In Japan Gets 2 Years Jail Time For Uploading Let’s Plays, Anime Spoilers”
sigh
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/06/01/are-fast-movies-really-a-substitute-for-the-real-thing-or-just-good-marketing/ the same CODA attacked that.
I wonder: Youtube FORCES ads on videos whether you like it or not. Only difference is you getting revenue or not. Does either case violate japan’s copyright law? How can you tell if the video poster is making revenue off of it?
Does merely spoiling a story’s ending without monetizing and permission is still an infringement? If so, they might as well sue anyone TALKING about an ending of a movie/novel. I’m still waiting for a lawsuit against wiki sites.
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Ah, right, that giant-ass thread full of Tero Pulkinnen-flavored shit. I imagine getting arrested just for showing gameplay footage is entirely up his sexual proclivities.
Call me cynical, but it’s a wonder how we haven’t heard more of such cases happening in Japan. Perhaps it’s because the streamer in this case wasn’t a youthful girl or a VTuber assuming an annoying moe avatar. Perhaps it’s because such cases are, in fact, more widespread than reported, masked by a judicial system so shitty Gyakuten Saiban was created from it, as well as by a homogenous population so cripplingly obedient they’ll gladly hara-kiri themselves if it means protecting corporate reputation.
What is certain that if the older trolls plaguing this site from pre/mid-pandemic times were still around, this is the sort of news that’d make them collectively jizz themselves in delight.
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No, it’s because most of the successful Vtuber companies are subservient to the whims of Nintendo et al there.
Hololive apparently “nuked” most of their streamers’ archives and “are in a process” of reuploading “non-infringing ones”, a process which continues to this day.
Even their BLOODY OVERSEAS SUBSIDIARIES follow JP law.
Just because it’s not important enough to be reported in the news doesn’t mean it’s not a known thing. And I’m in agreement wrt Japan’s media hiding just about anything that makes the Japanese government, industries and whatnot look bad.
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It’s Japan.
Remember the pitch document that Nintendo tried to drop a SLAPP on?
To those assholes, it’s an infringement simply to know it exists. Or to share it.
(This is besides the spoiler point, though. It is highly unethical to spoil media, but not illegal, and I hold the belief that humanity does not care about ethics.)
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I wouldn’t say highly, some people don’t care (either about receiving them, or giving them).
That said, a spoiler appropriately marked as such without actually spoiling anything in the title or preview is fine by me, as it lets the viewer choose.
I wonder if that was taken into consideration here?
Let’s plays of visual novels in particular are an oddity, since there isn’t any actual gameplay save for potential choices that lead to branching paths, thus a video can whole scale replace actually playing the title (in fact a video without added commentary played on autoplay may be functionally identical to running the actual game software on autoplay). Now the Japanese law here is crazy and disproportionate, but unlike most titles DMCA takedown requests on non-gameplay visual novels are roughly on par with a takedown requests on uploads of TV episodes as opposed to traditional takedowns on traditional video games (and a fair use analysis between the two would likely find the lets play of a visual novel to be much more likely to be infringing).
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Indeed!
Different land, different law.
Skipping the game aspect of it, laws are different in different places. People, their values, mores, and societal norms are different. For example, there’s no porn genre I’m aware of called “American schoolgirl” but lots of “Japanese schoolgirl.”
Similarly, the culture in Japan doesn’t lead to the two-party infighting and “No matter what this guy did, we won’t vote against him because he’s in our party thing.” Add to that “OUR copyright laws are so draconian we WILL silence that tongue” vs our 1st Amendment right.
To judge another culture by our laws is part of what we do. Russia is authoritarian. Iran puts people in prison for the wrong outfit they wore. Saudi Arabia beheads people. UAE puts a couple frollicking on a beach in prison. Turkey puts teachers, scientists (not a profession), and protestors in prison.
In the US we’re blameless. Cops kill PoCs. Texas governor puts razor wire in river to stop “invasion”. Florida governor says slaves got useful job skills so stop whining about slavery. Utah says if you rape your daughter-wire it’s not rape because she married you. Scientologists… (Danny Masterson, need I say more).
All our cultures have different laws, rules, mores, and values (and not in that order). Some of us say “Well I’m an American and these are our values.” They typically have an (R) after their name, which means Rookie at the Indy 500.
Some of us say that some of these things we cannot abide. My thanks that the ACLU, EFF, CDT, SPLC, and other fight for those rights.
Japan has its laws. They are not our laws. Don’t violate JAPAN’S LAWS IN JAPAN. Don’t rip off Iranian political signs off hotels in Iran [Don’t fucking GO TO IRAN]. Don’t insult Recep Erdogan in Turkey (or in the whole world if we start cowtowring to EVERYONE’S laws EVERYWHERE.)
Glad to be here. Love having my rights. To those who want to take them away from me, Skeeter said it best.
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Sure, their laws and their culture.
That doesn’t mean we cannot sit back and call bad laws bad.
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Oddly enough, this is why we also criticize the US.
If that's all it takes to ruin your manga/anime...
Hate to break it to them but if someone talking about spoilers regarding your manga/anime is enough to tank the sales your manga/anime probably wasn’t good to begin with.
Even a bloody murder mystery(wordplay absolutely intended) where finding out who the killer was is a pivotal part should have enough before and/or after that to still make for an entertaining read/watch the second time through, whether that be character development, little clues that might have been missed the first time or just interesting scenes/action.
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“Spoiler” is a value judgment implying precisely that one’s future enjoyment has been, well, spoiled. If someone hears the talk and later enjoys the thing that was talked about, then by definition it would not have been a spoiler (for them). But if they hear it and are sure it was a spoiler, there would obviously be no point in continuing to pay for the media.
All hail the COMPANY.
Harming the COMPANY is punishable by death rays.
Harm is determined by the feelings of the COMPANY.
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Shinra Electric Co. thanks you for your enthusiasm!
Good – let him rot.
Don’t do the crime if you can’t handle the time!
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“Spoilers got a man 2 years of jail time.”
“Good – let him rot.
Don’t do the crime if you can’t handle the time!”
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Snape Kills Dumbledore.
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And Soylent Green is people.
And Rosebud was the sled.
Oh, and Reason is a nuclear-powered DU flechette gatling gun, because we’re trying to see how many years one can get for spoilers.
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I suppose, then, that fanworks that do not outright praise the corporate work in question should also be charged accordingly?
Because that means things like DBZ Abridged, the former If The Emperor Had a Text to Speech Program AND Tex Talks Battletech should be considered criminal then because they’re fanworks that do not outright praise their IPs?
Or that fanartists should not not get hired because they drew porn? Because artists DO get hired in Japan and some of them actually draw PORN.
You do realize the chilling effects of that, right?
But since you would sacrifice the UNHRC at the altar of late stage capitalism, you probably would also like to DIE IN A DITCH IN BUMFUCKISTAN. BECAUSE YOUR LEADERS DECIDED TO START A FUCKING WAR THEY COULD NOT WUN.