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Japanese Police Charge 2channel Founder Over Forum Posts
identity0 writes "According to Japan Probe, Hiroyuki Nishimura, the founder of 2ch.net, has been charged with drug offenses by Japanese police over a forum post made on 2ch in 2010. He is not even accused of making the post, but of failure to have moderators delete it. The post apparently discussed drugs. 2ch.net (also called 2channel) is Japan's biggest forum, with over a million posts a day, of which the post in question was one. The site inspired image board 2chan.net (but is not directly related to it), which spawned copycat English site 4chan.net. More info at Slashdot Japan, if you can read Japanese."
shiranakatta!
So why did the police not arrest the obvious culprits ... all those moderators, each of which failed to delete that straw in the hay stack.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
How did he piss off the police department that they are going after him like this?
In Spanish there is Barrapunto (English description).
Having come to think of our Japanese brothers as a modern, civilized, and economic 1st World power, I find this quite disturbing. I have an idea where the Chinese are on human rights, and I remember the caning in Singapore of the young American vandal, but I suppose I had an idea the Japanese were somehow closer to the American or European personal freedoms ideal.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
For comparison, here's how 4chan is being handled (sorry for image rather than text).
TL;DR: there is not only thorough infiltration, but even the servers themselves have been physically moved to a rack owned by the spooks. With the amount of CP being posted to 4chan, it's not that surprising - what is interesting is that instead of playing whack-a-mole with chan sites, the biggest site itself has been partially subverted. At the cost of site quality (no moderation is done other than CP), but for the ease of government agents.
I opened an account...Five digit UIDs are still available...
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The 2chan guys have been sued hundreds of times. They simply ignore it. There are countless default judgements against them, which they also ignore.
I guess something about Japanese law makes these things toothless.
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Abetting drug dealing is the crime they're claiming. They're trying to extend it to an obligation to prevent drug dealing. To abet he has to have read them and known they were real and not done anything about them.
He is not obligated to read every post and moderate those posts for possible illegality. He can't anyway, he can't know the people behind it and can't know if they are trolls or dealers, even if he bothered to read every post.
So this is a pretty shameful attempt by the Japanese police to extend a law. If they succeed it (further) decrease freedom of speech.
If the posts were for drug deals and public, then the police could have made a drug deal, and arrested the dealers. So it seems unlikely that they were in fact real drug deal posts.
...for westerners who don't speak japanese and who can't afford a translator.
The Japanese courts do not provide them and do not take kindly to not being addressed in appropriate terms.
Also this law is pretty dumb.
I forwarded this along to my Japanese wife, who went and researched into the issue. Her response:
That article is not accurate. The police has identified at least 50 drug dealers using the website to sell illegal drugs now. The police has requested the founder to delete those posts many times, but he claimed that the ownership of the site has been sold to someone (which turned out to be a lie), kept ignoring the police warnings, and left the posts there.
2ch used to be one of the most popular forums, but the quality of posts have been questionable in the past couple of years. In fact, my uncle owned a clinic and someone kept posting horrible stuff about the clinic, so my uncle had to move his practice to other place and changed the clinic name. They tried to sue 2ch for not doing quality control properly but back then, there were no laws that could protect their rights. 2ch is now turning into something different where you can buy/sell illegal stuff and adult/kids porn. It's really really bad.
If the situation was the case as Japan Probe reported, there would be some more mainstream news sources picking up on it (Asahi, Yomiuri, BBC, etc). I would evaluate their article with a grain of salt.
Which is seriously one of the most ridiculous things ever. Why even make a foreigner apper in court if they're just going to say "aww too bad, no japanesey? guilty"
"The police has identified at least 50 drug dealers using the website to sell illegal drugs now."
So why are they deleting the posts and tipping them off and not arresting them.
" but he claimed that the ownership of the site has been sold to someone (which turned out to be a lie)"
I don't believe you because you say 'which turned out to be a lie" without putting the reason why it was a lie.
"ncle owned a clinic and someone kept posting horrible stuff about the clinic"
There's your motive for lying.
"2ch used to be one of the most popular forums, but the quality of posts have been questionable in the past couple of years"
As if the owner of 2ch has a quality standard to meet. Especially *your* quality standard.
He has no obligation to censor people on the request of the police. Just as you are free to make those claims here without censorship
The Internet cancer. This information needs to be more widely known.
As someone how has spend at least ten times the amount of time studying Japanese compared to Spanish
When you learned English, you may have been studying Spanish and not even known it. English absorbed a lot of words from French in the eleventh century CE, and French is closely related to Spanish. In addition, both English and Spanish are within the European Sprachbund, in which certain "Euroversal" features are common.