Japan Arrests Operators Of Three Sites For ‘Anime Spoilers’ Under Copyright Law

Here we go again. We’ve been discussing the iterative changes in Japanese copyright law for some time now. Those changes have been largely targeted rather than sweeping, though those targeted changes are arguably extreme in nature. First and foremost was moving copyright infringement largely out of the realm of civil law and into a criminal offense. While that is bad enough on its own, the Japanese government also demonstrated plainly that at least part of the impetus for these changes to copyright law were designed specifically to bend the knee to the country’s manga and anime industry. Those changes were especially worrisome, given they went beyond criminalizing direct infringement to also make it illegal to “infringe” in all kinds of indirect ways, such as sites that merely link to potentially infringing content, or individuals or sites that share “spoilers” for anime and manga content. That last bit is what led to one man being sentenced to 2 years in prison for engaging in “let’s play” and spoiler content in uploads to YouTube.

That wasn’t some kind of one-off, it appears. News out of Japan is that the individual behind 3 websites that served up spoiler content for animes and mangas has been arrested. Note the careful wording regarding the infringing content in the description.

As confirmed in the press release, the OVERLORD content uploaded included transcriptions of “detailed content of the entire story” and characters, dialogue, and scene developments while reaping the advertising revenue. Thanks to the cooperation of Miyagi Prefectural Police and Tome Police Station, these men were arrested after confirming they conspired, despite the violation of copyright law, to generate a profit. All in the interest of protecting the dissemination of culture, this signals how serious this offense is according to the Copyright Act and how effectively CODA coordinated these measures.

Elsewhere in the post are some nods to content that is more directly infringing of copyright. But it’s all vaguely worded for the most part. “The whole stories of these properties posted by the concerned website,” is an example. Does that mean it was a direct copy of the script that was posted? Or just a summary, as appeared elsewhere on the site? And then there’s this line:

While digitally edited to obscure the content, they showed heavily copyrighted material, with their posted example bearing the Godzilla Minus One title card.

If the only direct copying of content was the title card, and not the actual script or other content created directly by the producers of this anime and manga content, then that is a very different thing from posting actual creative content about the show or episodes to the site.

And this is exactly what you would expect from a vaguely worded copyright law designed to give broad and sweeping enforcement powers in order to act as government protection for a specific industry. You get vaguely worded reports about arrests made under that law, with a lack of specificity as to what the actual infringing content is or was.

The problem with sites that extract text from movies and other content is that they reduce people’s desire to pay a fair price for content, which can lead to people not seeing the official full-length movies, causing great damage to rights holders. In addition, the act of infringing on content that creators have spent time, effort, and money to create and unfairly obtaining advertising revenue is extremely malicious and should never be tolerated.

-CODA

Except we’ve seen the opposite to be true. We’ve seen directly, with books for instance, that spoiled endings don’t actually decrease the interest in the books that were “spoiled”. In fact, in most of the posts we’ve had discussing content-producers freaking out over spoilers, you will notice that they have tended to come from extremely successful franchises and content.

The spoiler thing is entirely overwrought, in other words. And while that’s certainly true globally, what Japan is doing in this space is the overreaction of the overreactions.