Gazbit’s Comments

• Feb 16th, 2019 @ 8:41pm

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Just to clarify.

  on Good Luck, Japan: Government About To Make All Copyright Infringement A Criminal Offense

  I never meant "you" you. Sorry if you took this personal.

  People in Japan are uneducated .. about what?

  About copyright and content related laws. Many people assume that it must be allowed since many other people do it (most do not bother to familiarize with the laws because they assume their actions are already non-criminal).

  Does Japan have anything like fair use?

  As long as they are fair they are OK. Unfortunately the police can have a person in custody for up to 20 days to decide whether it was "fair", and therein lies the possibility of abuse of the law if the scope of the law can be misinterpreted (law enforcement often ignore the supplementary document that describe the purpose of the law in detail; this succeeds if the suspect breaks under extended period of detainment).

• Feb 16th, 2019 @ 6:23pm

  Re: Re: Just to clarify.

  on Good Luck, Japan: Government About To Make All Copyright Infringement A Criminal Offense

  For the intended use of the law, this is apparent since you intentionally go to well known pirated content websites for the purpose of accessing illegal content.

  For abusive use of the law, average person does not (like storing favorite images from tweets - which is potentially illegal but most people are uneducated).

  Unfortunately, every person in Japan is expected to understand the laws (all laws are readily available and well documented) and being purposefully ignorant does not grant you any protections.

• Feb 16th, 2019 @ 2:15am

  Just to clarify.

  on Good Luck, Japan: Government About To Make All Copyright Infringement A Criminal Offense
  1. Capturing copyrighted images from publicly available broadcasts, web sites, ebooks is LEGAL (unchanged).
  2. Re-uploading copyrighted #1 images to the internet without proper permissions is ILLEGAL (unchanged).
  3. Saving #2 copyright infringing images to local device (incl. screen capture) is going to become ILLEGAL (currently it is LEGAL).

  So far storing copyright infringing uploads to your own device is LEGAL (even if you know the content was illegally uploaded). The new law will change this so that the users who download images from illegal content (mostly mangas) web sites are going to be held liable as well.

  So where is the big problem ?

  1. This law fails to effectively target the copyright violators the law initially intended to target (browser caches are not considered storing).
  2. This law will curb a lot of creativity and open discussions.
  3. Japanese Police is known to abuse laws even when the law makers clearly denote the intended purpose and the scope of the law. Police will be able to hold anyone with a smartphone in their cells for up to 20 days while they "investigate" possible copyright violations on their devices. Disappearing from the world for 20 days is usually enough to get someone fired from job, and is a very effective means of coercing a confession.