Forum - View topicNEWS: Japanese Government: Streaming Not Illegal Under New Law
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Son Gokou
 Posts: 79 |
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So do they mean that even if the one doing the streaming is unofficial/illegal, the one who's watching it is not liable in any means? Given live streaming of japanese channel is basically non-existant compared to the US and other countries.
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mgosdin
 Posts: 1302 Location: Kissimmee, Florida, USA |
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There is a reason why the adage "Be careful what you wish for." exists.
The Entertainment industry in Japan, and the U.S., has wished for this, now we will see if they are happy with the result. Mark Gosdin |
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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I don't think much can be read into this decision. It deals with the technical fact that streaming can create a local copy of the work on the viewer's computer and would thus, under a strict interpretation of the law, violate the no-copying rule. The possibility that browser caching constitutes a copyright violation has been discussed in US circles since the mid-1990's, however most of the litigation over caching has been directed at the search engines rather than individual users. By 2008 the US courts had ruled that search engines did not violate copyright because the owners of the works had implicitly licensed them for caching simply by posting them online. There are also technical methods for controlling caching, both via the HTTP "Cache-Control" headers and the generally accepted "robots.txt" standard. Following the line of argument in Parker v. Yahoo, browser caching would probably also be ruled legal in the US.
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Mesonoxian Eve
Posts: 1858 |
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Which is the fault of the government for passing laws based on emotion-without-fact in the first place. The US, which helped push this legislation in Japan, has already defined these separate (on paper, not technically) issues and offered exemptions in 1996. To see the Japanese government making this mistake in 2012 is disappointing news I've seen come from this island country and it really shows how sheltered its entertainment industry really is from the rest of the world. |
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Kikaioh
 Posts: 1205 Location: Antarctica |
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I don't think so. This news sounds more like a clarification that the copying required for users to stream legal web content is in itself legal --- illegal streaming would still be penalized.
You sound miffed, but I'm not sure I understand what for. Yuna49 seemed to explain it pretty well enough --- when an artist/company posts their work online for people to view/enjoy, a strict interpretation of previous copyright law would have implied that net-surfers attempting to access said content were technically copying the content to their computer without explicit permission, which unreasonably could have been interpreted as illegal. This law seems to clarify that an artist posting their work online is implicitly giving net-surfers and content-providers permission to perform that specific act of copying, since by posting their work online in the first place they clearly want their work to be accessed in such a fashion. |
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zensunni
 Posts: 1294 |
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Well, that's downright charitable of them! It is nice that buffering on legal streaming sites is not a crime over there! (DUH!)
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Jeikobu
 Posts: 154 |
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So is it considered illegal to watch illegally uploaded content on YouTube, i.e. anime, etc.? For example, I've noticed a lot of fansubbed Detective Conan past what Funi licensed can be found on YouTube. I'd love to keep watching it, but want to abide by the law. So would my watching it be considered illegal in either of the US or Japan?
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yuna49
Posts: 3804 |
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The rights holders can make a "take-down" request of Google at any time under the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Even foreign rights holders can make these requests because Google is subject to American law. Sony, especially its music arms, are quite aggressive about issuing take-down requests. I noticed recently that someone had posted the fansubs for the 2006 series Bartender on YouTube. They've been there a couple of months now. If the production committee wanted these removed, they'd only have to ask Google to do so. Same story holds for the noitaminA series Mononoke, the sequel to the "Goblin Cat" arc of Ayakashi Samurai Horror Tales. They're all on YouTube in some form. So while all these YouTube postings strictly constitute unlawful infringement, the mechanism of the "take-down" law lets copyright holders ignore infringing material that they don't care about or think might constitute an incentive for people to buy the actual licensed goods. My being able to watch Bartender on YouTube is very unlikely to influence sales of the program in Japan some six years after the fact. If anything some people might be encouraged to buy a copy. As for me, I bought the soundtrack CD. There's also the fact that fansubs appearing on YouTube don't earn the uploader anything. All those anime streaming sites exploit both the anime production committee and the fansubbing groups to earn advertising revenues. That seems like a really scummy business to me since all you're doing is earning money off others' hard work. So, to answer your question, I think anything on YouTube is pretty much fair game. If the production committee doesn't want it to be there, they can ask Google to remove it. The situation with AKB0048 is another good example. For a while they let people post the fansubbed episodes pretty much as soon as they were released. Now they are not on YouTube any more. (It's possible Satelight and friends still let the episode appear for a day or two. I haven't checked lately.) |
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Jeikobu
Posts: 154 |
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Thanks, that helps.
The only thing that concerns me is, what if I watched an illegal upload on YouTube and a record is kept showing I watched it, and I get in trouble someday later? Or is that even possible? I just want to make sure I am abiding by the laws and don't step on any toes. If it really is ok by the law to watch whatever is on YouTube, great, but if not, I want to make sure I know. |
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yuna49
Posts: 3804 |
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The only person for whom that matters is you. No one is going to comb through the millions of viewing requests at YouTube each day to go after you for watching an episode of Case Closed. There's really no enforcement efforts targeting viewers that I know of. Considering the huge amounts of infringing content on YouTube and its hundreds of millions of viewers, tracking individuals would be a tedious and unrewarding task.
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Mesonoxian Eve
Posts: 1858 |
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No, it doesn't, and all it did was give you misinformation. Just watch and stop worrying. You're not breaking any laws because there are no laws in these cases and there's a good reason for it: no one can define copyright infringement with this scenario. There's currently an ongoing copyright infringement case between Viacom and YouTube, which addresses this very issue. I highly recommend you read up on the case as it'll give precedent why it's an issue that will never have the viewer in legal hot water. If YouTube can't figure out what's infringement, there's no way viewers to a legal site will know. 
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