Slashdot Mirror
Japanese Government to Regulate Online Communication
Chris Salzberg writes "The Japanese government made major moves this month toward legislating extensive regulation over online communication. In a series of little-publicized meetings, two distinct government ministries pushed ahead with regulation in three major areas of online communication: web content, mobile phone access, and file sharing. Content regulation will cover anything on the web, including personal blogs and web pages. Upcoming mandatory filtering of mobile phone access is targeted at users under age 18, and will cover chat rooms, forums, bulletin boards and social networking services. File sharing legislation will initially target illegal downloads, but, according to critics, may ultimately broaden to include streaming media from sites such as YouTube."
Sony must be tickled pink.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
This is a way to make up for the deficiencies of Japan's legal system. Under the present system, people can post anonymously online , often through the "2ch" bulletin board, to make up false accusations about others, post their financial and medical records online, their bank account numbers, spew racist rhetoric, make death threats, etc. Japanese courts have shown no interest in enforcing the egregious violations of other people's rights. At present, there is a whole subculture of professional losers, the "NEETs" in their 20s and 30s who live at home with their parents and don't work, who spend their lives posting this stuff on the web.
MIAU just cause of it's name.
From what I read, I kind of skimmed over the article, this is more of internet regulation law, then internet censorship law. I think some from of such law should exist.
"The Japanese government made major moves this month toward legislating extensive regulation over online communication. "
Hmmm. Is this the point were everyone brags at how much better broadband is overseas?
How can this possibly happen, by blocking piracy, blogs, and youtube i would have no reason to go online
Just a question, can this ban or monitor IRC?
I swear I was listening to this song as this article came up in the newsreader.
Use the AskSlashdot section of this site to find out if your hair brained IT scheme is feasible before suggesting it or spending any money on it.
it's as if 1,000 tentacles cried out at once and were silenced
Just recently in Melbourne a newspaper journalist lifted comments posted on a forum and reported them as fact in a sensationalised article, without confirming or verifying with the authenticity of the comments, when in fact some of the comments on the forum had been made as satire.
This was then published in Australia's highest selling newspaper.
People may write unsubstantiated rubbish, but as soon as some lazy journalist finds it and treats it is fact in mainstream media, it can be very damaging for an individual or business.
I agree wholeheartedly, sir. The japanese are indeed a superior race *neckbeard*
"This is a way to make up for the deficiencies of Japan's legal system."
Nonsense. Dangerous nonsense.
You don't attack subcultures with censorship. This is about ethnic cleansing before the old guard leaves the Diet. Anyone trying to close a society does the same things, censorship is just one of the steps taken.
It's part of the Lock Down of Japan that is underway. If you don't believe that, you 1. don't live here and 2. don't understand the xenophobia the government is in the process of stoking up.
- Fingerprinting (and if you don't give them they are "forcibly" taken, then you are deported... what does "forcibly" mean when the government uses that term?)
- Random "Gaijin Ca-do Checku" (dirty foriegner passport or residency cards are randomly checked by cops... usually as you're trying to board a train making you late)
- New Visa rules (which aren't clear)
- Black vans with police protection broadcasting "Foreigners go home" from loudspeakers waking me up in the morning...
I'd love to stay... they want everyone non-japanese to leave. And they want all foreign influence and opposition crushed.
Never been through any of that before. Of course, looking the part helps (after all, if they don't know you're not Japanese, why would they check you?) which is hard to do if you're unmistakably non-Japanese.
But that bit about the xenophobia is true. I've noticed it. You'd think that they'd want to encourage immigration with their population declining and all that...
OSx86 FTW
>professional losers, the "NEETs"
Hey, I'm working very hard to became a NEET in as few years as possible!!.
Who will bring us the famous cup then? I is sad.
If I and 10000 other people (anonymously) threaten to kill you, but someone completely different guns you down in the street - how does that make fore mentioned death threats credible?
You know... credible as in I and those other 10000 people could be sued and sentenced? Or even investigated.
Imagine it like this...
Say Benazir Bhutto got a anonymous death threat, and police started arresting random people during her political rallies because they "looked suspiciously like someone who might be writing and sending death threats in his/her spare time".
If you allow credibility for anonymous claims - shit... I'll just go and open myself a anonymous bank account and anonymously claim that all Bill Gates' money belongs to me and should be transferred to that account.
And since its cool and credible, anyone can just waltz into a bank and take some cash from it.
Try thinking anonymous as synonymous to "troll". It should help.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I think a lot of the government supported xenophobia in Japan is a result of a general lack of societal interest in the government. Sure, almost every democratic style nation has this problem to some degree, but in Japan, it appears to be at an extreme level. No one really seems to care what goes on with the government. I know I'm generalizing a lot here and admit that my research of this topic is shoddy at best, but this is how it appears from my end and talking to friends of mine who have spent a couple years there.
The "Foreigners go home" broadcasts mildly amuse me though. I would venture a guess that it's a private anti-foreigner group doing it that has been attacked in the past or threatened, and thus the police escorts. KKK rallies here in the USA have similar escorts.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
1. If your youth is computer-savvy, don't say "you can't do this online". That's like a ten-dollar hooker asking not to get it in the ass in a locker-room full of viagra-ladden football-players, even though no-one has mentioned anything about sex yet.
The Japanese government will NOT be regulating Gundam content.
All death threats have credibility. Anonymous threats have no more credibility than non-anonymous threats (in fact, they have less). Just the fact that Bhutto was threatened and then killed is meaningless in this context; how many death threats has George Bush faced and yet he's still alive?
Since I'm anonymous, and merely as an example of the "power" it lends, I'm going to threaten to kill you and your family. Are you worried? Do you actually think I could do it? Am I any more credible than the guy who sits next to you at work or on the bus and threatens to kill you? In all seriousness, I would never do this, but someone more evil might actually be serious about it, and would still be no more credible than the other two.
The point is, this drastically damages free speech under the guise of "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!" which is downright despicable. First the Australians, now the Japanese. Freedom of Speech isn't optional, nor was it ever intended to be limited to only those over 18, non-felons, and the wealthy, and yet more and more this is the road we're traveling down.
I read the article and after you get passed the first part and down to the "steps" listed you will see that there are several different issues here, but no laws (that I can tell).
1) The web.
For the web content it looks like they want to be able to filter at will anything the independent body deems "harmful" but don't forget that they will have to prove its harmful and be able to justify their decisions. I am sure that they will see a lot of input from the educational institutions and rights groups on this. One would also note (as did the article) that this doesn't apply to private personal communications (which I take to mean email, chat, voip, etc). And don't forget Japan has a court system too, if this does become law it will see challenges to it. Also this seems to be just a report or recommendation at this point and is not a bill or a law and (according to the article) has not yet been proposed as a bill.
2) Mobile phone filtering for persons under 18.
If you read through this it is clear this was enacted because of parents concerns. Though filtering was available before it was not well advertised and very rarely used. This order (the article doesn't say its a law) just requires the filtering to be on by default and the owner of the phone (usually the parents) can request it (the filtering) to be disabled. So if the parent has a problem with there child's mobile web access being filtered they can just request it be turned off.
3) File Sharing.
This is at the behest of the RIAJ (Recording Industry Association of Japan). They are just doing the same thing as the RIAA. From my take on the article it looks like they are using the same reasoning and justifications as the RIAA have done, and I doubt they will be anymore successful.
So from what I can tell there are no laws or proposed bills yet (other then possibly the mobile phone web filtering, anyone know if this is a law or just a decree?) and there are groups out there speaking against them. They are using the public comments system and voicing their opinion. If you are a Japanese citizen or permanent resident and you have a problem with it voice your opinion about it too. But don't claim it to be more then it is. This same stuff has come up in the US before too, remember the war on porn anyone? Just don't forget that there will be plenty of opposition, after all we know what the internet is for. ;)
~Petaris "The world is open. Are you?"
This makes perfect sense to me now. You have to control communications when the UFOs and Godzilla invade Japan.
Credibility? After ten minutes on /. people should have figured out that 'wildly inaccurate' can shout just as loudly as 'incredibly insightful'.
(And there is a lot more 'wildly inaccurate' out there.)
And the apparent slow return to the 1920s mentality over there is indeed a bit disturbing. Especially when you see how that turned out (not really taught in western schools for some reason despite it being a large part of WWII)...
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
it's plain old wartime censorship, pure and simple, that Japan is trying to sneak past its citizens. the dictator's friend returns to the land of the rising sun.
hint: the new Samizdot is likely to be podcasts, not flimsy typewritten pages passed from hand to hand in a corner of the subway station. to find that, you'll have to also allow no-knock searches at 2 am, jackbooted police thugs, and firing squads.
now, are you ready for the whole bill of goods?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Why would Japan target this stuff at those under the age of 18, when official Japanese adult-hood starts at age 20?
File sharing legislation will initially target illegal downloads
How do they figure out if a transfer is illegal? Surely people transfer copyrighted materials for many legal reasons. This is always the big problem with these schemes.
Twinstiq, game news
I don't support this decision by the Japanese government. We've yet to see even one functional Internet content filter.
-A portion of the material they filter is safe, ie. not supposed to be filtered
-A portion of the material they should filter goes by unfiltered
-The filters can be bypassed with the same services a lot of Japanese (and Chinese) Internet users have used for Internet anonymity for a while now
The first point makes for angry customers who one day can't visit their favorite (safe) pages anymore.
The second point raises questions about the "think of the children" argument used to support the mobile Internet filtering.
The third point makes a lot of otherwise normal citizen into law-breaking criminals.
This has all the chances to backfire and very little chance for profit. Hopefully Japan gets a real political revolution sometime very soon.
Thank god the Gopher underground will still be able to prevail against this censorship.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
A personal webpage is something you purposefully visit, not something that is being broadcast to you. You have to explicitly request a file from my webserver to get to my personal webpage, which means that you agree to an implied agreement that you do so out of a desire to learn more about me as a person. Therefore, if something I say makes you feel offended, you should simply stop visiting my page. It is as if you ask a person "what do you think about Bush?" and he says "he is a *beep*". If you are a Bush supporter you may feel offended, but you have no right to sue or do anything because it was you that asked and you got exactly the information you asked for. When you asked and I replied, I had no intention to offend you, but only to document the contents of my brain and be truthful to you by telling you exactly what my brain was thinking about Bush. I don't think one should feel offended for received a truthful exact answer to their question. That's exactly what happens on a personal webpage (or blog): You ask me for my personal opinions by downloading my files from my webserver. Since it is you that asks me, and not me broadcasting this information to you (for example, by sending this via email without you asking for it first, or by broadcasting it on radio and holding a megaphone to your ears, etc), you have no right to create problems to me for documenting my life and my opinions online. People of the Internet era want to be open humans and want the world to be able to know their opinions on every topic (if you haven't understood it yet, we have entered the voluntary openness era and privacy is not the same as it was before, while in the past people were reluctant to talk about their opinions a lot, now people actually want to do exactly that).
The problem with various laws and especially laws like libel etc is that it is very easy to have an innocent face charges for anything they said even if it wasn't really offensive or libelous. I have come up with a solution that can enable me or anyone else to say anything I want without having people feel uncomfortable or offended: I express my opinions with numbers instead of words. So if I want to say that I dislike Bush I will say "Bush gets -1" and if I want to say that I like Ron Paul I'll say "Ron Paul gets +1". If I want to explain why I feel such about a politician, I just list all their policies or actions and give numbers next to each other indicating my approval or disapproval (for example, Preemptive War: -1, or Pro-life: +1). This way, nobody can claim that what I say is libel or offensive or anything. It's just numbers, and numbers cannot offend anyone (well, expect for some fundamentalists who get mad over 666 and other superstitions). The advantage of communicating with numbers is that since numbers aren't regulated by laws, you can say anything you want (within reason) and document your exact opinions (if you use many numbers), without allowing anyone feel offended. So for example, if you want to comment on a news story on your blog and the story is politically sensitive and could somehow lead to legal problems, just say "my opinion is -1" instead of "my opinion is that this politician is a thief or whatever".
Of course I should also draw attention to another issue, that if you stop using a right given to you (free speech), then you lose that right at some point in time, so rights are supposed to be used every day. However, the idea of communication with semantics different to those in mainstream (and therefore legally liable) use, such as numbers instead of words, can be useful in various situations where you either cannor or don't want to attract many critics.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge,
For in their heart's they dream themselves you Master"
> This is a way to make up for the deficiencies of Japan's legal system. Under the present system, people can post anonymously online, often through the "2ch" bulletin board, to make up false accusations about others, post their financial and medical records online, their bank account numbers, spew racist rhetoric, make death threats, etc.
I agree that that's a problem, but why is this the best solution? Don't you think they can do better?
Anonymous posts can be traced if they're bad. Financial and medical records should be protected with privacy laws. Racist rhetoric, well, I think it should be countered by people standing up to them and telling them they're wrong. Death threats should be investigated if there's any reason to believe someone will act on them.
> Japanese courts have shown no interest in enforcing the egregious violations of other people's rights.
I thought the police would do that? And even if it's the court's job in Japan, how will more laws help if they won't enforce the ones you have? Why are these laws the best way to solve the problem?
> At present, there is a whole subculture of professional losers, the "NEETs" in their 20s and 30s who live at home with their parents and don't work, who spend their lives posting this stuff on the web.
I thought you said the people were anonymous. How can you so quickly assign collective blame to one group? What are they, Edo era peasants? What next? Goningumi?
For those wondering, gonigumi were five-family groups. If any group member did something bad, all were punished.
Bah, xenophobia, or an objective plan for self fullment... Either way if someon's waking people up in the moring, they'll need protection.
good, less crappy (and usually WARPED) Japanese TV programming on the front of youtube, phwew