File sharing in Japan

File sharing in Japan is notable for both its size and sophistication.[1]

The Recording Industry Association of Japan has used a 2010 study to suggest that illegal downloads (which have been illegal since 2010) outnumber legal ones 10:1.[2][3]

In 2012, a law was passed that would invoke penalties for accessing pirated music or movies.[3]

In 2020, the National Diet passed a law expanding the penalties to the download of manga, academic texts, and magazines, as well as banning "leech websites" that provide users hyperlinks to download torrent files of pirated materials, pasting hyperlinks of illegal websites on an anonymous message board, or providing "leech apps" for similar purposes. The part on the expansion of penalties took effect on 1 January 2021, and the part on regulation of leech websites and apps took effect on 1 October 2021. The new legislation exempts "minor offenses" and "special instances" (such as unintentional instances in screenshots, parodies and derivative works, and other small instances, such as downloading only a few frames from a comic book of several dozen pages, or a couple of pages from a novel containing several hundred pages) from being categorized as illicit due to concerns it would clash with the right to freedom of speech. Penalties for operating or establishing leech sites will be set at up to five years in jail or a maximum fine of 5 million yen. The law focuses mainly on content downloaded to devices, so a loophole may exist in terms of livestreaming such content.[4]

Unlike most other countries, filesharing copyrighted content is not just a civil offense, but a criminal one, with penalties of up to ten years for uploading and penalties of up to two years for downloading.[2] There is also a high level of Internet service provider cooperation.[5] This may be one of the reasons that anonymous networks such as Winny, Perfect Dark and Share are thought to be popular compared to public networks such as Bittorrent, WinMX, Gnutella (Cabos) and OpenNap (Utatane).

  1. ^ Shirley Gene Field (2010). "Internet Piracy in Japan: Lessig’s Modalities of Constraint and Japanese File Sharing". Archived 2014-04-07 at the Wayback Machine University of Texas Masters Thesis.
  2. ^ a b "Japan introduces piracy penalties for illegal downloads". Archived 2014-04-19 at the Wayback Machine BBC.
  3. ^ a b Leasca, Stacey (1 October 2012). "Japan introduces strict anti-piracy laws". The World from PRX. Archived from the original on 2020-11-11. Retrieved 2020-09-04 – via GlobalPost.
  4. ^ "Japan enacts copyright control law to ban pirated manga downloads". Kyodo News+. 5 June 2020. Archived from the original on 2020-09-04. Retrieved 2020-09-04.
  5. ^ George Ou (March 16, 2008). "Japan's ISPs agree to ban P2P pirates". Archived 2014-04-07 at the Wayback Machine ZDNet, .

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