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Illegal Downloading Now a Crime In Japan With Increased Penalties
eldavojohn writes "Although downloading songs without paying for them in Japan used to be a civil offense starting in 2010, it is now a crime with new penalties of up to two years in prison or fines of up to two million yen ($25,700). The lobbying group behind this push for more extreme penalties is none other than the RIAJ (the Japanese RIAA). The BBC notes this applies to both music and video downloads which may put anime studios in a particularly uncomfortable position."
I'm a struggling open source artist trying to make some cash, but as long as pirates are allowed to download what they want.. well, they will download the popular songs and not mine. By fighting against piracy, we open source artists win as people have to listen to our music instead.
This is not only true for music, but also software development and everything else FOSS. If anti-piracy would win, then so would open source software.
Isn't Japan the country whose P2P scene is dominated by darknet software like Winny and Share?
It is not worth wrecking the lives of the people involved just to boost sales of your crappy open source music.
The lobbying group behind this push for more extreme penalties is none other than the RIAJ (the Japanese RIAA).
What? Were you expecting piracy to suddenly be OK, just because it happens outside the US?
If you think the anime studios are in a particularly uncomfortable position, you should see what happens to their characters.
Yeah! Let's wreck the lives of the artists instead. That'll show them.
Hopefully a family member of someone from the RIAJ, or maybe a politician's kid will be the first one caught.
Most piracy comes from overseas where stupid regions and language-locks prevent people from accessing said media.
The only time it becomes a problem is when Funimation or some other company licence a local copy for whatever language / region and there is the subbed version still up.
Most subbing sites make it a point to ban Japanese IPs since they don't want piracy, they are just doing a job that often studios simply can't afford for those not in the direct target audience. (those who live in Japan)
The corporations are fearful of losing their monopolies. They are upset that technology allows duplication.
They are trying to secure their monopolies through legislation. I believe in protecting copyright laws of product names, logos, and slogans. To protect the creator or manufacturer's name from being used to sell products that are not of theirs. But to it is ridiculous to have a patent on design of the product, computer code, musical patterns, architectural structure, methods, shapes, colors.
To say someone owns a shape or design is a monopoly, a tyrants game.
It's the opposite of democracy that the ones with money get to decide about legislation.
as we now say in Japanese
I guess one is supposed to be pro-piracy around here, but I am OK with piracy being reduced. If the artist(s) want a monetary compensation for their works, it's a fair deal. Of course if they set a price too high or make a crappy product, it's also fair for me to not buy it. But it's not a excuse to download it for free... Unless the producers choose so. For example if the anime studios feel that piracy has helped them, then why not just put up some free clips online in the future, by your own.
boycott. don't buy any material falling under this law. When enough do this sales will drop and they will notice. Out of sight & sound out of mind and ear. It doesn't exist.
There is plenty available for free.
I would love to see (yeah it'll never happen) if nobody pirated _anything_ for a year. Would that kill the industry outright you think?
Let me know when record company executives are jailed for fleecing the artists they con into signing slavery contracts. You can also let me know when any of the money that is collected by the RIA* ends up in the hands of the artists.
Sorry but when I hear "Japanese torrents" I think of something completely different.
What a ridiculously disproportionate penalty, I thought only the US was that screwed up.
I blame Sony.
I'm living in Japan, so lately I have been renting a "seedbox" in the Netherlands for $15/month.
I can download whatever I want to through the web interface, then copy it via sftp.
I'm sure solutions like this will start becoming a lot more common soon.
I love it that we live in such a world that ENTERTAINMENT industry takes over our lives thanks to whom we will be spied on, fined, prosecuted and taken away our rights because of mere suspicion we're about to do something (it will happen soon enough). There are lots of people who are victims of crime, who have their shops or pubs demolished, people that fear for they safety because there is no one to protect them or ones who lose all their money in some sort of a scam. But no one cares about their rights. It's all about people who are so obsessed with money that want more and more and more. Politicians go up their asses to please them while ignoring the people who enabled them to have this richness and power in the first place. Sometimes I'm sad that our world works like that, sometimes I don't give a damn. All that would take to fix it is for a nation not to buy certain things for certain time so everyone would come to minds and got their priorities straight, but I don't think it's possible. People rather have camera installed in every single of their room than not be able to watch their favorite soap opera or listen to some music they like.
My Windows is NOT slow, it's special!
But they'd be well into Romney's 47% here in the States !!
To me it seems like the RIAA and the fim makers have opposing goals.
The RIAA seems to want people to pirate (proof: the unskippable "educational" messages and other bothers that don't appear in the pirated version) so they can sue them and get some money. Thus they lower the quality of the official versions with respect to the pirated versions. The film makers want to sell their films, and don't want the viewers to pirate. To lower the quality of the official versions with crap like unskippable messages is contraproductive to this. Somehow the RIAA has the film makers believing the nagscreens are good. Dunno how they did it.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Population of Japan: ~128 million
Estimated Illegal Downloads: 4.38 billion
That works out to be a 34 songs per person per year in Japan. Somehow the mathematics just aren't there ....
... because it goes against the laws of nature. Lets face it. There is no way you're going to be able to take away all the computers now in existence for creating and copying content. Not only that anyone who makes war on general computing will eventually leave a giant market open to competitors who's machines are not locked down. This happened with DVD players, why wouldn't it happen with computers?
1. Gather a list of hundreds of thousands of torrent downloader IPs.
2. Demand that these IPs be reversed to actual people and prosecuted at government cost.
3. Threaten that the RIAJ will start a public campaign accusing anyone who does not support the prosecution of everyone on the list of being "soft on crime".
4. Profit.
Socialize the costs, privatize the profits. This is a really big win for the recording industry.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
That thinks that the best way to combat these stiff penalties is to *not steal* the software/music/movies?
For the love of all things good... what sort of lot will get all bent out of proportion because someone made a law with a stiff penalty to combat something that is morally and ethically wrong?
"They made the penalty for murder... DEATH.. WTF?"
Average kid downloads 1,000 songs that could have been purchased for $0.99 each, so studios lost $999 (artists even less). Average Chinese bootleg produces 100,000 CDs and studios lose $1.3M. Why not go after the real problem?
This is really a sad day. Such a stupid way of dealing with things.
Time to get a VPN!
www.notgetcaughtdownloading.com
Studios didn't "lose" anything - they just didn't sell that much...
Two years for downloading a song? OK. Here's what I'd do. I'd take a baseball bat, beat the shit out of one of those RIAJ's exec, steal his wallet and buy all the songs I want with HIS money. If I get caught, I'd get what? 6 months? I think it's worth it.
What makes you think your average kid would have paid for those songs if he wasn't able to "pirate" them? What makes you think the people who buy bootlegs would have paid full price if the bootlegs weren't available?
The answer is that you have absolutely no clue, and therefore your monetary estimates are false.
The reason they don't go after the real problem is that the *are* the real problem. The don't fill a need anymore. Poor independent bands can buy or rent the equipment to record their gigs on the money they make from them, and distribute it for micropayments online, and market themselves through social media and viral youtube videos. The last claim they have is some sort of content filtering to get rid of all that terrible music you would have to listen to to find what you want. The epublishing business has shown that user reviews are sufficent to flag the low quality stuff, so even that claim is bogus. They are spending huge amounts of money, not finding the good stuff, but promoting what they found whether it is good or not (sometimes it is). They are also spending huge amounts of money legislating their own existance. I'm looking forward to the day when a large venue like Wembley stadium realizes some internet phenomenon can sell them out without going through a label, that would be a turning point I think.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
"Illegal" downloading is now a crime? So, "illegal" downloading wasn't a crime before? I really must re-visit my understanding of the work 'illegal'.
Of course, laws prohibiting speeding only tend to catch a few people too... so I would argue that the inability to enforce it universally should not be an excuse to not try. At the very least, perhaps, some may simply curtail the illegal behavior only because they do not wish to be caught.
(Disclaimer... since the last time I said something like this here, it evidently wasn't obvious): I realize, of course, that there are deeper reasons for laws prohibiting speeding which relate to issues of public safety, and I'm not comparing the act of copyright infringement to driving 80 miles per hour down a residential road... only comparing, perhaps superficially, the similarity in the attempts to prohibit them.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
And it will if they get the chance.
These cretins must not be given an inch. Destroy them and their business, because they are the self-declared enemy of culture.
This is not an issue of copyright and free culture coexisting; it is a battle for survival.
it is a fact that Executed Criminals do not commit further crimes (and may give pause to others considering Murder or anything else that would draw Capital Punishment).
i personally think that Big Content will be happy only when we have a Media Consumption Tax (everybody pays X dollars or Y% of income for Media every year). The real mindbender is if this replaced paying for Big Content Media folks might actually LIKE IT.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
...but in practice there is a large set of labor that humanity needs in order to survive, and that basically nobody wants to do. People with wrecked lives are far more willing to do it.
There is also the issue of most people basically having the same skills as everyone else, driving the wages down for huge categories of labor, confining most people to poverty. That problem is pretty hard to solve.
fines of up to two million yen ($25,700)
And this is still far less than the $150,000 maximum for the civil penalty in the US. Joel Tenenbaum owes the RIAA $675,000. He might prefer two years in jail compared to a lifetime of indentured servitude trying to pay them off.
Now YakuRIAJ?
This doesn't make any sense to me...
Are they even aware that the internet and "piracy" is their biggest ally in promoting and bringing their media and artists overseas?
I have been involved in Japanese pop culture events and I know this for a fact.
This is a huge shot in the foot for Japan.
They are already loosing exposure with the fall of Megaupload and the fast takedown of similar sites, this will make things even worse.
And for the record, I haven't met a single japanese person that had the slightest idea on how to get the w4r3z and evil illegal downloads and it would be to much of a hassle really. They have easy and convenient 24/7 access to all kinds of legal media, digital or physical, brand new, rental or 2nd hand.
showing you the source.....
We have one country declaring filesharing legal and free for personal use, another declaring life ruining prison sentences. Shit is getting out of hand.
They're talking about whether or not something *should be* legal, and you're talking about whether or not it *is* legal.
I honestly don't remember the last piece of media I've purchased aside from my Netflix subscription. The RIAA/MPAA has long since soured me on ever contributing to their current business model of overpriced plastic discs containing some files. They may kick, scream and claw on their way down, but its inevitable where they are heading.
This "War on File-Sharing" is going to go the way of the "War on Drugs"... And we see how well that's going at the moment don't we?
The folks over at QuestionCopyright.org have posted an informative talk on the roots and history of copyright laws: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhBpI13dxkI
The key point was surprising to me: copyright was designed to subsidize distribution, not creation.
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
The Subject "Illegal Downloading now a Crime", says it all, and what it says is that the corporations have won. If it was illegal downloading then it would have already been a crime, or it would not have been illegal downloading. "Illegal Downloading", has traditionally not been an actual thing but instead is a term used as a scare tactic. Similarly there is no such thing as an illegal copy. Traditionally, it has been the distribution or copying itself that is illegal, unlike stolen goods which remain tainted, Copies made without authorization have no lasting taint to them. So traditionally it has been the case that if someone serves you a song, they are the ones that are liable. If you serve it back out because you're on P2P, then and only they are you also liable. But the PR war was so effectively won, that this major change, is mis-reported.
These two corrupt organizations have nothing to do with this in Japan, really.
That aside, anime prices are way too expensive in Japan. Esp. since they only release two/three episodes a BD disk every two months or so. (And in rare cases, one.)
http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/search3.html?q=Hyouka&media=blu-ray&r=any&step=20&order=score [cdjapan.co.jp]
11 Volumes (22 episodes + 1 OVA) at a price of $88.66 per volume.
Would you pay nearly $1,000 for one series?
The comment quality always seems way lower on copyright articles. For every 10 decent comments, you have 90 apparent propaganda posts. Regular slashdot articles have much better quality comments from a wide variety of posters. These fake comments tend to go over the top and double down on RIAA philosophy. They push horrible ideas the MAFIAA would never dare say publicly.
These muppet comments also quote the supposed pro-piracy bias. If this article was any indication, the Slashdot community are 90% MAFIAA muppets. I know that's not the real story. If you counted only posts from real posters, that would tell a different story. Among American adults, about 50% are pro piracy. 70% of the younger generation is pro piracy. The slashdot community is bound to be higher.
I can't answer every inane argument I saw here without an essay, so I'm gonna pick a common one. Anti piracy activists love to argue from free enterprise. It goes something like this: "Thou shalt be free to buy or sell music at a mutually agreed price. Thou shalt not download anything if there is no transaction." This argument assumes intellectual property should be respected and protected. Sorry to break it to you, but I'm not interested in preserving a privileged class of entertainers, especially not on the backs of the shrinking middle class and growing lower class. I can obtain my music with free enterprise, for free. After my friend Charlie pays for an album, I engage in a free enterprise transaction with him. I do not require the services or consent of the original merchant for this transaction. I am not bound by the terms Charlie agreed to. If Charlie breaks some agreement between himself and the merchant, that is not my problem. If this ruins the merchants business model, also not my problem.
In short, I have the natural right to download whatever I want, whenever I want. My natural rights overrule the current corrupt legal system. You will get my "illegal files" when you pry them from my cold, dead hard drive.
The good news is that if MAFIAA feel the need to disrupt our public forum with their drivel, they must be scared. In fact, all of the 1% is scared of "one man, one vote" for different reasons. This greedy, petulant, aristocratic concept of 'intellectual property' is on its way to history's dustbin.
Thank god you can still sniff little girls' underwear .
In an interview, one of his team member explained that he was sent to a motion picture "Le Roi et l'Oiseau" to take high-speed pictures of some sequences to understand how the animation could work the way it worked.
When they later said that to the animation studio. They were incredibely flattered. Good to know that now he would be considered a criminal.
When Edison made himself an asshole by enforing heavy IP rights on every movie producers, they fled east coast into Hollywood and spurred creativity. But now the planet is running out of places to run to...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
The robots are cheaper. Or rather, there is significant economic incentive to make the robots cheaper, because once they are cheaper than the human labor, the maker of said robots makes a fortune.
Of course the robots create jobs too....but they put more people out of work than into work (they must, otherwise the total cost of ownership would not be cheaper than human labor).
So, over time, the need for labor shrinks even as the population grows. Capitalism doesn't work well in such a situation, because it produces widespread poverty in a social class that is unable to find work. Our government has already intervened somewhat in response to this: it pays farmers to NOT grow food.
We can expect to see more of this weird business of paying people to abstain from work....or of continually increasing crime and ever-more jails (where those who have jobs pay to feed and clothe the criminals). Either way the system is not sustainable indefinitely.
Eventually we will establish new values in response to our new tech...or we will bomb ourselves back to barbarism.
Japan has always been very kind to the jewry. Even when they were in the Axis, the little jewry who lived there were not hurt in Japan and more were invited to immigrate by the Tokyo government, even though jewry did not heed that advice.
Japan now realizes the antisemitic act of P2P downloading and sharing of unpaid Broadway music and Hollywood movies cannot continue. Hollywood and Broadway was founded by jewish investors and still to this day are owned and run by them. It is abysmal that goyim people can steal from jews, unpunished, that is a virtual Crystal Nacht!
Japan is now righteous among the world and hopefully this move is sign of a moral reform in the island, that will see tentacular perversion and loli-pedo disappear for ever. One can only hope the japanese, who are indeed the lost tribe, will one day return to Abraham's bosom if they can continue following this righteous path.
And think.. although *most* people on /. clearly get it, there's still a few shills out there. so LOOK.. Musicians except for the top 5 percent don't now, and NEVER HAVE made money from records, except for a few hundred bucks per.. I started playing in the music biz *40 years ago* so i think I have seen enough examples, thank you.. The problem is those people who put out tracks that are incapable of repeating these live.. such as tone deaf teenybopper "chanteuses" that can't actually sing without digital correction, or one finger keyboardists that record one bar per hour. on some digital program..
The whole point of recording USED to be as publicity for performances.. until , basically, Elvis and his 50 million records, where suddenly even at, say, a penny each.. he done good.. We don't all sell 50 million records, but the few ones that do have plenty funds for lobbying.. y'think?
I'm a struggling open source artist trying to make some cash, but as long as pirates are allowed to download what they want.. well, they will download the popular songs and not mine.
Your argument rules out that people are not downloading your work because they can access "popular" media. Perhaps you should consider your media isn't popular for other reasons, ie: it's not very good.
But yes yes, blame the pirates, it's all their fault your "art" is unappreciated.
I live in Japan for about 8 years now. What makes me sick is this: you can walk into any porn store in Japan and you can *legally buy child porn*, but you can face jail if you make a backup copy of it. At shops like Lamtarra they selll hundreds of "gravure" porn videos of girls as young as 12 (yes, twelve). This is perfectly legal with the japanese government. Try to copy that and you are doing something illegal.
How is this possible? It's simple: 12-year old girls don't have a lobby and they don't bribe the japanese government. The music industry does, though.
What the original story here on Slashdot does not mention is that not only the downloading is a criminal act under the new law, but even making a backing-up copy of any DVD or CD you *own*. Even if the backup copy is only for your private purposes. Among other things implied by this law is: buying a CD, converting it to MP3 and listening to that music on your ipod or whatever is illegal. Buying a DVD, making an ISO image and watching from the ISO via DAEMON tools or whatever is illegal, too. Converting the DVD to a format so that you can watch it on your PSP or whatever is illegal, too.