On March 13 2019, the Japanese government reportedly gave up submitting an amendment of copyright law to the Diet. (Please read “Japan to amend copyright law to combat piracy” for the proposed amendment.) It was specifically for anti-piracy, but it generated strong public reaction to the expansion of punishment against downloading of pirated copies. It is very rare for the government to stop the submission at this stage. In fact, content creators, such as The Japan Cartoonists Association, also have expressed concern about the proposed amendment. For whom was the anti-piracy measures? The problem is that the consensus-building process was not appropriate in this case. The government just paid attention […]

Piracy is a serious problem. Piracy causes heavy damage to copyright holders and content business. The amount of damage for manga and animation in Japan is about JPY 200 billion (USD 1.8 billion), according to a government survey in 2014. In order to solve this problem, the Japanese government tried to legislate piracy website blocking. However, the government had to give up the legislation for that (See here about this). Because it encountered strong opposition, considering infringement on the constitutionally guaranteed secrecy of communication. Therefore, the government is going to implement an alternative measures to combat piracy. The report published on February 4 2019 and approved by the advisory committee on […]

Piracy website blocking has been one of the most controversial topics in Japan. In April 2018, the government decided on a policy to legislate for piracy website blocking by Internet providers, to combat piracy websites with copyright infringing content of manga, animation etc. However, it has been strongly opposed by lawyers and academics out of fear that it is likely to infringe on the constitutionally guaranteed secrecy of communication. Accordingly, the government reportedly has decided to postpone the legislation, and instead it is considering alternative measures – e.g. regulating leech sites which guide users to piracy sites. It is rare (at least in the intellectual property field) that the government […]