 Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs, the government body promoting Japanese arts and culture, is considering a proposal by print publishers to revise the national copyright law. The proposal seeks to broaden the scope of online downloading activities that are considered illegal to include knowingly downloading pirated still images, such as scanned books.Japanese copyright law already prohibits the act of creating and distributing copies of pirated content, but it specifies the deliberate downloading of only pirated video and music works as illegal. According to Nikkei Business Publications, the proposal will be submitted to the Diet, the national legislature, when the next ordinary session convenes in the beginning of 2019. The measure was introduced on October 29 onto the agenda of the subcommittee which oversees publishing and copyright matters at the Council for Cultural Affairs. It follows four months of meetings held by an intellectual property strategy working group which involved top publishing executives and legal experts. Domestic publishers have asked the government to include still images in the scope of copyright law as large-scale websites distributing pirated print content—namely Free Books, Haruka Yume no Ato, and Mangamura—have emerged since 2017. At the inaugural meeting of the working group in June, the publisher Kodansha said it stands to lose ¥500 million in sales of digital comics every month because of these "leech" sites. The revision initially called for publishers to work with law enforcement and web providers in blocking access to such websites. Legal experts in the working group, however, raised concerns that monitoring Internet access could be a violation privacy laws. Article 21 of the Constitution of Japan stipulates, "No censorship shall be maintained, nor shall the secrecy of any means of communication be violated." Therefore, the group sought precedent in the video and music industry, which prohibited downloads of pirated video and music content in 2010 and also introduced penalties. A Kodansha public relations official also echoed this stance in an interview with Nikkei Business Publications earlier this month: "For Kodansha, our first and second priorities are regulating leech sites and making still image downloads illegal. Next is introducing new legislations for automatic filtering, controls on advertisement and distribution, raising awareness on copyright, etc." Publishers believe the revision will have a deterrent effect on the act of casually downloading pirated content. But rights groups argue that lawmakers and publishers have not clearly defined what still images are considered pirated. For example, screen captures of a website or a Twitter user's profile image using an animation still can be construed as pirated content. "Finding information that you care about on the Internet and saving it is what everyone does on a daily basis. If it becomes illegal, people will be hesitant to gather such information and eventually the 'right to know' may be restricted," says rights activist Koutarou Ogino in a statement to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. Ogino is the founder of Uguisu Ribbon, a campaign designed to improve awareness regarding protecting freedom of speech. The Movements for Internet Active Users, an association of Internet user rights advocates, also expressed worry about encroaching restrictions by the government. "We are concerned that further cases which threaten the rights of general users will increase," the association said in a statement released on November 9. Responding to these concerns, the earlier Kodansha official points out that, under current law, there have been no arrests where an individual only downloads video and music works and does not upload them. He asserts that arrests are made when an individual uploads pirated content using peer-to-peer software. The official says publishers would like to see lawmakers close the loophole in Internet users' view that "using pirate sites is not illegal." According to the Asahi Shimbun, the Council for Cultural Affairs is still considering whether future legal restrictions are necessary in the first place and to what extent content that is clearly pirated is subject to regulations. Lawmakers will continue to deliberate on the appropriate wording on any eventual law. Source: Asahi Shimbun Digital 1, Asahi Shimbun Digital 2, Nikkei xTech |
| Looking forward to the future where merely thinking of a copyrighted character without paying a fee is punishable by arrest. Sasuga, Nippon! |
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| I wonder how this will affect illegal streaming sites or free manga sites. I've never actually downloaded an anime or manga but I've "consumed" free content. |
| Jesus Japan needs to get over this McCarthyism era ... Internet was built off peer to peer. I believe a anime had a episode that talked about these people trying to ruin part of Japans economic success |
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Valenthyne said: Looking forward to the future where merely thinking of a copyrighted character without paying a fee is punishable by arrest. Sasuga, Nippon! They're not wrong. All of this content is available in Japanto be bought be it physical or digital so there's nothing from japanese to make use of those things. There's no reason for people to not buy. You're of course complaining because you won't get free manga with a law like that but they're not doing that for westerns but because of japanese people that are doing that even if all of those things are available. And it's not even like manga isn't cheap because it is, both in volume format and magazine, be it digital or physical. Anyway, this is for Japan where the content is plenty available in their language. |
| Sasuga Japan. A very nice way how to hang yourself. |
| eh, people leeching off manga aggregator sites and the publishers are understandably not happy. not that i expect things to change significantly. it certainly didnt stop music and video piracy. |
| You can buy lossless digital music from your favorite Japanese artists on https://ototoy.jp/. The songs are all DRM-free and you can re-download your purchased albums as you wish. Show your support to your favorite artist if you can! ps. if you are looking for Japanese albums, you have to search it in Japanese (not romaji). Just copy and paste the name. For those who want to learn Japanese through anime Resources for learning the language |
| Good thing I've been preparing for the worst. Already have 1.3TB of manga downloaded over the past years & will continue to add to my digital library. |
satine13 said: Good thing I've been preparing for the worst. Already have 1.3TB of manga downloaded over the past years & will continue to add to my digital library. i will come to you if something happen ,i have very few manga downloaded . *how do you download your manga ?? |
| Yeah, good luck, but it sounds like a waste of time. Haruka Yume no Ato was very big, but it was replaced by a dozen of different websites as soon as it was shut down, it didn't matter at all. And downloading pirated content has always been easy, at most you'll make people start using VPN and stuff, but you can never really stop piracy. the publisher Kodansha said it stands to lose ¥500 million in sales of digital comics every month because of these "leech" sites. As usual some bullshit numbers are thrown out. There is no way all the people casually downloading/reading manga on internet would buy them if they had to pay for it. Do they really think they would earn this money if they could stop piracy? |
| They can try, yes. |
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| They really need to focus on making stuff accessible, affordable and available instead. There's simply too many manga being published right now and people can't afford many of them. There's a reason why free wew-manga are super popular nowadays. Raw manga piracy isn't even big at all. At public sites, only some selection of raw manga actually get uploaded and even than it's really inconsistent! English scanlation is even smaller. I just checked ebook store, this month alone, there's 260 manga released in Japan, but only 12 actually get scanlated/licensed in English language and half of them are no longer scanlated at all, dead! Trying to stop this is just waste of time and money since it's only a little part of manga industry that actually get pirated. And big chunk of them are already mainstream-level popular like Weekly Shounen magazines. |
Cross  AngeHey guys check my profile for current airing season anime recommendation (guaranteed best taste) |
| "Piracy is almost always a service problem." - Gabe Newell |
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| good luck to them, manga piracy will still continue after this |
| It's entirely right and sensible that the same rules that apply to music and video content should also apply to still images and as a result I am not in the least bit surprised that the reaction on here is primarily negative. |
| There is no such thing as shit taste. Only idiots who think everyone should have the same taste as they do. |
| tbh first of all fuck piracy. people working on their works deserve to be paid. it’s not okay at all to consume their stuff what they worked for, for hours upon hours for free. i hope they get successfull with this and stop piracy bit by bit. and then of course shut down the big manga sites in the western internet !! another thing i wanted to say is that reading a lot isn’t justification to do piracy cause if you can’t afford that many manga then don’t read that many manga. |
aybekay said: tbh first of all fuck piracy. people working on their works deserve to be paid. it’s not okay at all to consume their stuff what they worked for, for hours upon hours for free. i hope they get successfull with this and stop piracy bit by bit. and then of course shut down the big manga sites in the western internet !! another thing i wanted to say is that reading a lot isn’t justification to do piracy cause if you can’t afford that many manga then don’t read that many manga. No, it's rather if there won't be any license we cant read any manga. I can buy around 20 volume each month and if nuts enough 100 volume but some Manga was never available in my place. Ordering from outside sometimes take times and it also have doubled price. "If you can't afford any manga then don't read any" isn't a good argument for what makes the community bigger. Ofc you can't justify piracy but that doesn't mean you should blame all the loss on it. First of all idk where they asspulled 500 million yen loss, That doesn't make any sense at all. Even a game industry that cost more than anime industry never stated any loss because of the piracy. This is Kodansha trying to maximise every pennies they can suck for their company. Skittles said: "Piracy is almost always a service problem." - Gabe Newell My thoughts exactly. Digital manga already made but in the end, some country still aren't available to use it. Jinbou said: the publisher Kodansha said it stands to lose ¥500 million in sales of digital comics every month because of these "leech" sites. As usual some bullshit numbers are thrown out. There is no way all the people casually downloading/reading manga on internet would buy them if they had to pay for it. Do they really think they would earn this money if they could stop piracy? I think they calculated how much money they can make if they're doing the same by making similar site, torrents, and gain money from ads or stuff. Then they count it as loss. That said , it'll do nothing to piracy. On top of it , it might backstab the industry in future. Well fking good luck though. |
| Another blow on piracy huh? Don't bother Japan. I've seen this done before, but what do you know, piracy is still alive and kickin' for years. One word for this: tryhards |
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| Yeah yeah. The U.S. can't even eliminate piracy, what can Japan possibly do? And how long have they been at it anyway? |
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| I still don't know how Japan comes to be stricter when it comes to their anime, manga getting pirated and scan and uploaded illgeally, it this is one of the reasons why Pokemon SM and Pokemon Movie 21 didn't got uploaded illegally on Kissanime because of this? I know video streaming and web manga is already on the rise in Japan, but doing pirating things get certainly caught by the Japanese government though monotoring. And now they intend to block anime and manga stuff online illegally and make us overseas not watching to watch/read it illegally is making Japanese government like they are xenohobic as they are. And for J-Music, i still hope Johnny's Entertainment will have its own youtube accoutn and upload it legally, and have J-Music talent agency uploading full mv, and also one day to relax its copyright laws to make Japanese music video more accesbile too. Screw you, Japan! (sorry for my poor English) |
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| There will come a time when even borrowing a book from your friend will be punishable by law. |
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Catalano said: There will come a time when even borrowing a book from your friend will be punishable by law. Seeing spoiler and telling is punishable by law according to Japanese rule it seems... |
| Sorry, you can't do that Japan. -World |
| nothing will happenn as usual. also it's legitemately bad for the japanese "anime/manga" industry to do this but hey, it won't happen so whataver |
aybekay said: tbh first of all fuck piracy. people working on their works deserve to be paid. it’s not okay at all to consume their stuff what they worked for, for hours upon hours for free. i hope they get successfull with this and stop piracy bit by bit. and then of course shut down the big manga sites in the western internet !! another thing i wanted to say is that reading a lot isn’t justification to do piracy cause if you can’t afford that many manga then don’t read that many manga. It's the only way in some cases. Where can I buy the NGE? Where can I pay to stream it? Where can I buy printed english volumes of 7 Seeds? I can't so it's either pirate or just not consume it |
| That won't kill piracy especially with the prices of anime, it's too high, lower the damn prices oh and better yet, get that team for anime up. Actually solve the problem properly and not with unnecessary laws. |
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Shinmurai-kuN said: Hoppy said: That won't kill piracy especially with the prices of anime, it's too high, lower the damn prices oh and better yet, get that team for anime up. Actually solve the problem properly and not with unnecessary laws. Nobody will do that. Politicians in Japan seem to be very old, like one of the ministers of cyber-stuff who said he doesn't know how to run a computer. New generations are more likely to open for computer while the older generations are not, new generations of politicans will take over the roles of their old generations in political and do something more stricter in regards to piracy of their stuff they made for sure. |
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Hoppy said: That won't kill piracy especially with the prices of anime, it's too high, lower the damn prices oh and better yet, get that team for anime up. Actually solve the problem properly and not with unnecessary laws. What do the prices of anime have to do with piracy of books? |
| There is no such thing as shit taste. Only idiots who think everyone should have the same taste as they do. |
Waro9 said: Why cant you guys strictly pirate non licensed anime and manga. And I know most of you dont because those manga and anime have hella low amounts of people listing them and the shows that dominate are those that are licensed. Are you seriously expecting people who don't use legal streaming services to care which anime are licensed and which are not? |
 I'm watching anime since 2012. I also play games, sometimes. Don't bother me if you want to 'become friends' or things like that. It's tiresome. I know you just want to collect some meaningless numbers. Thought: How many people sparked H. Charlotta just for blue pot? |
| UnCool Japan ® ?? I Guess evolving your business model is too much to ask for old publishers. No stuidies have shown that piracy of media content has resulted in 'lost sales' because most people would not buy the product to begin with. its basically free advertising. Also isn't it pretty easy to come up with ways to entice people to buy things? At a certain point people's discretionary funding dries up as well, its called financial repression/AbeNomics sucks. |
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| Yeah yeah. The U.S. can't even eliminate piracy, what can Japan possibly do? And how long have they been at it anyway? |
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| That won't kill piracy especially with the prices of anime, it's too high, lower the damn prices oh and better yet, get that team for anime up. Actually solve the problem properly and not with unnecessary laws. |
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VyseLegendaire said: UnCool Japan ® ?? This is why Cool Japan fund by the Japanese government are full of failure pledges to support and spread Japan's pop culture around the world and even being beaten up by South Korea's pop culture Korean Wave/Hallyu from it. Video from Popsori can show this example: |
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hotsushikun said: In an unrelated news: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2018-11-23/korea-largest-illegal-manga-website-shuts-down/.139880 Sad to see. God bless Piracy and pirates. They're risking everything to jailbreak mediocre content day in and day out. hotsushikun said: VyseLegendaire said: UnCool Japan ® ?? This is why Cool Japan fund by the Japanese government are full of failure pledges to support and spread Japan's pop culture around the world and even being beaten up by South Korea's pop culture Korean Wave/Hallyu from it. Video from Popsori can show this example: This doesn't surprise me. The cool things speak for themselves. Whenever government steps into something, it achieves the opposite of the intended effect. |
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| Good luck fighting piracy, Japan... lmao |
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| Depending on how far they go with this it's going to be interesting to see what measures they take to counter piracy. However, I feel like this will do nothing but cause more people to resent the government/companies that support this. Resent will cause even more people to pirate just to spite the rules implemented to counter piracy. Good quote by Felipe Falanghe, creator of Kerbal Space Program on game DRM to counter piracy: "My opinion is that DRM is an illusion. You can’t beat piracy more than you can beat an earthquake. And in the end, all DRM does is make your paying customers resent you. " |
Least degenerate visual novel enjoyer.  |
| My god, it's like those people can't read. There's really people talking about english releases and whatever when this is a thing about domestic sales in Japan, not for us in the west. The excuse for piracy don't even work here because japanese have complete access to digital and physical manga and magazines. hotsushikun said: I still don't know how Japan comes to be stricter when it comes to their anime, manga getting pirated and scan and uploaded illgeally, it this is one of the reasons why Pokemon SM and Pokemon Movie 21 didn't got uploaded illegally on Kissanime because of this? I know video streaming and web manga is already on the rise in Japan, but doing pirating things get certainly caught by the Japanese government though monotoring. And now they intend to block anime and manga stuff online illegally and make us overseas not watching to watch/read it illegally is making Japanese government like they are xenohobic as they are. And for J-Music, i still hope Johnny's Entertainment will have its own youtube accoutn and upload it legally, and have J-Music talent agency uploading full mv, and also one day to relax its copyright laws to make Japanese music video more accesbile too. Screw you, Japan! (sorry for my poor English) What the fuck are you even talking about? hahahaha Is this a joke post or what? They're xenophobic because they're trying to stop piracy in Japan and you think they're wron? Jesus, reread your post and look at how stupid it looks. You're talking about "they won't have us have products illegaly" with a straight face. GangsterCat said: They really need to focus on making stuff accessible, affordable and available instead. There's simply too many manga being published right now and people can't afford many of them. There's a reason why free wew-manga are super popular nowadays. Raw manga piracy isn't even big at all. At public sites, only some selection of raw manga actually get uploaded and even than it's really inconsistent! English scanlation is even smaller. I just checked ebook store, this month alone, there's 260 manga released in Japan, but only 12 actually get scanlated/licensed in English language and half of them are no longer scanlated at all, dead! Trying to stop this is just waste of time and money since it's only a little part of manga industry that actually get pirated. And big chunk of them are already mainstream-level popular like Weekly Shounen magazines. There's a reason for why there's only 12. Those companies aren't global companies much like Marvel Comics and DC comics aren't, they are companies who work for their country and the works go to other countries as a license. The only difference between those publishers is that DC and Marvel are american companies with english as main language so their digital offer can be seen by every world (and even then there's still piracy) while with japanese publishers, they obviously have japanese as it's main language and translations of all of their catalogue like people want would be ridiculously expensive for companies that are domestic ones. Otherwise, digital manga, web manga, magazine manga and volumes of manga for e-book and amazon are all available in japan so a japanese doing that don't have any excuse, it's all available to them. |
VyseLegendaire said: No stuidies have shown that piracy of media content has resulted in 'lost sales' because most people would not buy the product to begin with. its basically free advertising. This isn't true anymore. Some American authors proved piracy affected their sales by deliberately spreading incomplete copies of ebooks on the day of their book's release to pirate sites. Impatient fans who couldn't find a complete copy instantly were forced to buy from Amazon and there was a significant increase in sales during the 1st week of release compared to their previous book. Full article: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/06/pirated-ebooks-threaten-future-of-serial-novels-warn-authors-maggie-stiefvater There was also an article on ANN a few months back about how manga and LN sales increased 4-5 times after a recent closure of a popular pirate site in Japan. Full article: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2018-06-08/manga-light-novel-creators-claim-sales-increase-after-piracy-site-closure/.132639 I agree that Japan's business model needs to change but people should stop spreading false info about how piracy doesn't lead to lost sales bec it's been proven countless times that they do. |
| That's a false notion. Firstly, I support authors/artist/companies/etc. taking pro-active steps to increase sales. What you described is an instance of author doing just that. They enticed potential customers to buy with their scheme, but admittedly it wasn't foolproof since it will be pirated eventually. But its not a study showing that piracy 'causes sales loss' because, as you stated, the problem is really content providers being unable to force the hand of buyers without better incentives or copy protections. Of course closures of mega piracy sites will increase sales, at least in the short run.…but isn't it also true that some of those buyers may have only read the series in the first place due to the exposure in the free/piracy realm? I wonder if people in time will keep buying once they run out of interest in the series they were halfway through reading already. From what I can tell, sales could be way better if authors and creators didn't rely so much on the copyright cartel to coddle them from birth to death. Right now we see great change in how contents are distributed - moving to subscription/streaming/online only models all over the place, but that's only half the battle. |
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| I didn't say those were studies but there's a lot of proof that piracy leads to decrease in sales. This idea that piracy is just "free advertising" may have been true in the past when ebook sales made up for a very small percent of sales, but that is no longer the case. If your claim that there are no lost sales "because most people would not buy the product to begin with" were true then the steps the author took and the take down of the pirate site shouldn't have resulted in a dramatic increase of sales, but they did. Clearly a lot of people who would've bought if there was no option chose to pirate instead. |
VyseLegendaire said: That's a false notion. Firstly, I support authors/artist/companies/etc. taking pro-active steps to increase sales. What you described is an instance of author doing just that. They enticed potential customers to buy with their scheme, but admittedly it wasn't foolproof since it will be pirated eventually. But its not a study showing that piracy 'causes sales loss' because, as you stated, the problem is really content providers being unable to force the hand of buyers without better incentives or copy protections. Of course closures of mega piracy sites will increase sales, at least in the short run.…but isn't it also true that some of those buyers may have only read the series in the first place due to the exposure in the free/piracy realm? I wonder if people in time will keep buying once they run out of interest in the series they were halfway through reading already. From what I can tell, sales could be way better if authors and creators didn't rely so much on the copyright cartel to coddle them from birth to death. Right now we see great change in how contents are distributed - moving to subscription/streaming/online only models all over the place, but that's only half the battle. the whole "exposure" argument is utter bs as shown by the ANN article. many mangaka already let people read the preview pages, which is more than enough to decide if you like the series or not. there is also the option of reading user reviews. no, you do not need to illegally read the entire volume to decide if its right for you, just as you dont need to eat the entire cake before deciding whether to buy it. the samples offered are enough. and lets be honest - whats the incentive for buying something you already read, already have an illegal copy stored in your hard disk and can read at any time, and have already memorized the dialogue and the humor therein? also, riddle me this: if piracy is meant to increase series recognition, then why are people pirating manga of well known series like Sword Art Online, No Game No Life and Attack on Titan? they are already well known series, there are official english releases...and people will still pirate them. why? because its free of course. mangaka dont need piracy to spread their work. if they really wanted, they could share some of their own work on pixiv or whatever. they never asked people to illegally share their works without their permission. hiding behind the "raise awareness of the series" excuse is not only wrong, it is asinine. |
DreamingBeatsNov 23, 2018 10:59 PM
| You can buy lossless digital music from your favorite Japanese artists on https://ototoy.jp/. The songs are all DRM-free and you can re-download your purchased albums as you wish. Show your support to your favorite artist if you can! ps. if you are looking for Japanese albums, you have to search it in Japanese (not romaji). Just copy and paste the name. For those who want to learn Japanese through anime Resources for learning the language |
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