Japan Arrests Operators Of Three Sites For ‘Anime Spoilers’ Under Copyright Law
from the spoiler-alert dept
Here we go again. We’ve been discussing the iterative changes in Japanese copyright law for some time now. Those changes have been largely targeted rather than sweeping, though those targeted changes are arguably extreme in nature. First and foremost was moving copyright infringement largely out of the realm of civil law and into a criminal offense. While that is bad enough on its own, the Japanese government also demonstrated plainly that at least part of the impetus for these changes to copyright law were designed specifically to bend the knee to the country’s manga and anime industry. Those changes were especially worrisome, given they went beyond criminalizing direct infringement to also make it illegal to “infringe” in all kinds of indirect ways, such as sites that merely link to potentially infringing content, or individuals or sites that share “spoilers” for anime and manga content. That last bit is what led to one man being sentenced to 2 years in prison for engaging in “let’s play” and spoiler content in uploads to YouTube.
That wasn’t some kind of one-off, it appears. News out of Japan is that the individual behind 3 websites that served up spoiler content for animes and mangas has been arrested. Note the careful wording regarding the infringing content in the description.
As confirmed in the press release, the OVERLORD content uploaded included transcriptions of “detailed content of the entire story” and characters, dialogue, and scene developments while reaping the advertising revenue. Thanks to the cooperation of Miyagi Prefectural Police and Tome Police Station, these men were arrested after confirming they conspired, despite the violation of copyright law, to generate a profit. All in the interest of protecting the dissemination of culture, this signals how serious this offense is according to the Copyright Act and how effectively CODA coordinated these measures.
Elsewhere in the post are some nods to content that is more directly infringing of copyright. But it’s all vaguely worded for the most part. “The whole stories of these properties posted by the concerned website,” is an example. Does that mean it was a direct copy of the script that was posted? Or just a summary, as appeared elsewhere on the site? And then there’s this line:
While digitally edited to obscure the content, they showed heavily copyrighted material, with their posted example bearing the Godzilla Minus One title card.
If the only direct copying of content was the title card, and not the actual script or other content created directly by the producers of this anime and manga content, then that is a very different thing from posting actual creative content about the show or episodes to the site.
And this is exactly what you would expect from a vaguely worded copyright law designed to give broad and sweeping enforcement powers in order to act as government protection for a specific industry. You get vaguely worded reports about arrests made under that law, with a lack of specificity as to what the actual infringing content is or was.
The problem with sites that extract text from movies and other content is that they reduce people’s desire to pay a fair price for content, which can lead to people not seeing the official full-length movies, causing great damage to rights holders. In addition, the act of infringing on content that creators have spent time, effort, and money to create and unfairly obtaining advertising revenue is extremely malicious and should never be tolerated.
-CODA
Except we’ve seen the opposite to be true. We’ve seen directly, with books for instance, that spoiled endings don’t actually decrease the interest in the books that were “spoiled”. In fact, in most of the posts we’ve had discussing content-producers freaking out over spoilers, you will notice that they have tended to come from extremely successful franchises and content.
The spoiler thing is entirely overwrought, in other words. And while that’s certainly true globally, what Japan is doing in this space is the overreaction of the overreactions.
Comments on “Japan Arrests Operators Of Three Sites For ‘Anime Spoilers’ Under Copyright Law”
“Hey, if you didn’t want me promoting your content, then you could have just said you’re tired of attracting new customers and satisfying existing ones.”
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“Hey, if you didn’t want me promoting your content, then you could have just said you’re tired of attracting new customers and satisfying existing ones.”
WTF is “heavily copyrighted material”? I mean… either it’s copyright or not.
As an English speaker, I read translated manga, and webnovels. But to be honest, one of my big turn offs is misrepresentation and glorification of copyright and similar laws in those fictional stories.
So while I think Japan has some great cultural outputs…. they also have insanity. And when that insanity extends too far, people (or at least some of us) will completely lose interest in them.
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Sorry, you posted exactly when I did, about the same thing…
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uh-oh. you mean I committed the crime of spoiling your comment?
(to be read as humor |& a mockery of a “totally nameless” third party)
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If I had to guess, “heavily” was supposed to modify “showed,” that is, it’s a poor word choice and syntax saying that the website showed a large amount of a copyrighted work, hence the example that it showed the title card.
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Or it just means a copyright owned by someone particularly litigious.
Hmm… So there are grades of copyrighted material, from heavy to light? Are there gradations of penalties as well?
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The grades of copyrighted material go from heavy to very heavy. And the penalties match those grades.
Throw away the key.
/s
They must REALLY hate channels like Pitch Meeting, How It Should Have Ended, and … pretty much any movie reviewer or rating site on the planet.
When people know that a movie is a dog, of course they aren’t going to go watch it in the theater, or maybe not even streaming.
I always look up spoilers to determine if an anime is worth my time, saved me from wasting a few hours giving garbage a chance. Perhaps Japan knows their constant adaptation of cookie cutter power fantasy light novels starring sao Kirito for the literal 50th time in 10 years are terrible and don’t want us to realize the widely known truth.
So, does anyone have any recommendations for a good anime that’s licensed under Creative Commons or is public domain?
Something I can watch and flip the bird to copyright maximalists with at the same time?
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Most anime will likely not pass into the public domain in the US until 95 years from the date of publication (since they’re often published by corporations rather than created by singular persons), so anime from 1980 will enter the public domain in 2075.
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Or maybe not; see Wikipedia’s page on Japanese copyright law. Japan has made various changes to its laws, presumably at the behest of local and American copyright monopolists, but “This new term was not applied retroactively; works that had entered the public domain between 1999 and 29 December 2018 (inclusive) due to expiration remained in the public domain” (nevermind that “between” and “inclusive” contradict each other). Except, “In 2007, following a lawsuit from Toho over the rights to Akira Kurosawa’s films, the Tokyo District Court appended that for films released in 1970 or earlier, copyright protection is extended until 38 years after the original copyright holder’s (i.e. the director’s) death, thus bringing hundreds of public domain films back into copyright.”
The page is fairly unclear and lists many different rules and exceptions. Plus, other countries may have different views of when Japanese works enter the (local) public domain. If you want to post it on Youtube, you’re probably gonna have to wait till it’s undeniably public domain everywhere.
One of the earliest anime series was Astro Boy, which ran 1963 through 1966. Is an episode legally a “film”? If so, the director died in 1989, and it’ll be public domain around 2027. If the older 30-years-after-publication applied, it’s been public domain for decades without anyone knowing. Is in considered a corporate work? Does it matter?
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I think you missed an important distinction. The copyright status of a work under Japanese law is generally irrelevant when talking about US copyright law. Many works that were released in the US are copyrighted when they were released in the US and are subject to US copyright law restrictions at the time of their publication in the US. So the works could come into the public domain in Japan decades before they do in the US.
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No, that was mentioned in the second paragraph, “other countries”. But note that “copyright” sometimes isn’t even about copyright law. For example, most Youtube takedowns are done via private procedures rather than actual laws; it’s Google’s deals with the studios that matter, regardless of what the law says. Anti-circumvention laws might be relevant for anime released with DRM, which is most of it. Sometimes it’s just about how much the lawyers can intimidate people.
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YouTube takedowns happen because of the privileges granted by copyright laws to copyright holders and their agents. But that’s beside the point. The person to whom I responded wanted public domain works. I mentioned when those works would likely enter the public domain in what is likely their country. Japanese public domain status for a work will likely mean they need to proxy to a Japanese IP address to watch those works from a “legal” source.
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DMCA takedowns work that way. “Content ID” takedowns are extrajudicial.
Even assuming some anime enters the public domain in our lifetimes, a lot of major internet services are operated by, or via services provided by, American companies: Amazon, Google, Microsoft. If something’s public-domain in Japan but not the USA, it may still be subject to takedown on that basis.
I believe Microsoft (USA) already tried to fight some US legal process, targeted at a non-US customer of a non-US Microsoft subsidiary. Let’s not act all surprised when someone tries to do the same with copyright.
Project Gutenberg’s already been dealing with shit related to “public domain somewhere” books. Anime is like 50 years behind.
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In the sense that YouTube can take down what it wants, yes, but YouTube is also incentivized to remove content that will otherwise get it sued by wealthy and well-lawyered copyright owners. Copyright law is still the basis for this.
Except not everything is hosted by American companies on American servers, so some legal Japanese content could still be accessed by proxy (or just in general if they don’t care to block foreign IP addresses).
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Yes, but that’s all copyright law. The copyright law of any country in which YouTube could get sued. Which means that being public domain in only a strict subset is a problem.
No doubt. The question is, are companies gonna find it worth their while to structure themselves and their servers to take advantage of these “loopholes”? I doubt Youtube would start a Japanese subsidiary, using strictly Japanese infrastructure, just to distribute public-domain-in-Japan-but-not-the-USA works. They don’t actually care about the public domain, and being still owned by a US company they’d have some residual risk anyway.
Japan’s a somewhat insular society, so they probably do have local streaming services, not owned by foreign companies, using only Japanese infrastructure. I still wonder whether any of them will care about the public domain. I guess we’ll see around 2050, when semi-modern anime starts to enter it (assuming the laws don’t change to prevent that).
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But viewers are typically only in one country. So if something is public domain in the US, you can often watch it on YouTube in the US and the Japanese copyright owners of the same media that is still under copyright in Japan wouldn’t be able to sue YouTube to take down the access for American audiences. So the particulars of which country we’re referring to are the likeliest to affect availability.
YouTube already has videos that aren’t available to people in some countries because of differences in copyright law or just owner preferences. This includes videos that aren’t available to viewers in the US, but are available to viewers in other countries.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/92571
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Of course they can sue. I guess Youtube feels comfortable with that risk, which is to our benefit. But geo-location doesn’t provide any “official” loophole I’m aware of, and doesn’t always work that well anyway.
If we imagine the opposite situation, of Youtube’s US servers duplicating US-copyrighted material to send to Japan where it’s public domain, that’d probably be a bit riskier. It doesn’t really matter if it’s legal in Japan when the action is done in the US by an American company.
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Including my not being able to watch an SNL skit during a vacation in Scotland because YouTube had no license to stream it in the US and its geographical block was overbroad?
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I doubt there are any publishers that would chose a libre/FLOSS-esq license to publish under.
So, you probably are restricted to just dōjinshi that are original works.
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Whoops, realised I had poor wording: I mean “you probably are restricted to some subset of dōjinshi that are original works”
Spoiler
Bruce Willis is a Ghost.
Sue me.
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Not yet he’s not. Or are you talking about his character in The Sixth Sense? Oops…
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Denver Masonry
I always check spoilers to decide if an anime is worth watching—it saves me from wasting hours on something mediocre. Japan might be aware that constantly adapting the same cookie-cutter power fantasy light novels with a protagonist like Kirito from Sword Art Online for the 50th time in a decade is just repetitive. Maybe they don’t want us to catch on to that well-known fact. Denver Masonry
Is it just me, or does the article at Screenrant, scream “Written by AI”?
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Screenrant is trash. I quit going there when they put a spoiler for one of the Money Heist seasons IN A FUCKING HEADLINE the day the series was released.
The articles have always read like they were written by high school kids.
anime manga japan
This is the nintendo approach to copyright attacking fans or websites that discuss content or manga anime that fans love
theres 100s ofwebsites that discuss marvel and sci fi action films and movies and comics these mostly serve to promote and serve as discussion portals for fans to celebrate their particular fandom
this is the reason theres very few videos that can show playthroughs of nintendo games on youtube
As a fan of Overlord
…Since I live in the states, and have to wait for the next Light Novel, Manga, and TV Series/Movie, I love reading the plot synopses, etc. Then I freaking read/watch it when I can get my hands on it.
From the same country that gave us Palworld, which cannot actually be played in Japan comes anime and video game spoilers that cost the people who spoiled the games their freedom. The punishment for violating copyright actually makes people who live in a free society more willing to break those laws, and for the same reason Westerners read Solzhenitsyn during the Soviet era.
If somebody was willing to sacrifice and go to jail for you to read this, then it must be important.
Wikipedia may be shutted down like this if it's headquarters in Japan.
In Wikipedia there are plot on each article about anime and manga. If we assume on the Japan copyright law, this will be copyright infringement, Jimmy Whales will gone for 2 years, and Wikipedia will shutdown forever.
If they had just used the spoiler tags they could have avoided all of this.
Here’s my take.
If a spoiler keeps you from seeing a movie or show or reading book once.
It’s not a movie, show or book that you’d ever see or read twice.
Good movies, shows and books keep peoole coming back.
Crimilzi g spoilers only protects bad crearators