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A 39-year-old website administrator located in Tokyo, Japan was recently charged with violating the Copyright Act for posting “spoiler articles” containing written summaries of movie and anime plots. As reported by Asahi Shimbun, on April 16, the Tokyo District Court sentenced the man to one year and six months of prison with a suspended sentence of 4 years, and a penalty of 1 million yen (approximately $6.3k USD). The criminal complaint against the website administrator was filed back in late 2024 by Kadokawa Corporation and TOHO, the copyright holders of the works summarized on the website (source: Content Overseas Distribution Association, hereafter CODA)
The problematic articles in question include a full summary of 2023 film Godzilla Minus One (owned by Toho) and the third season of the Overlord anime (owned by Kadokawa), which aired back in 2018. According to the prosecution, the Godzilla article was over 3,000 characters in length, explaining the plot of the film in detail from beginning to end, while the Overlord summary piece also included character names, transcribed dialogue, action, scenes, plot twists and several screenshots from the anime. Consequently, Kadokawa and Toho argued that this style of article constituted an “adaptation” of the original works, and could thus be considered copyright infringement.
Showing all 12 replies.
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>>50901503
>charged with violating the Copyright Act for posting “spoiler articles” containing written summaries of movie and anime plots.
Lol
>Consequently, Kadokawa and Toho argued that this style of article constituted an “adaptation” of the original works, and could thus be considered copyright infringement.
Lmao even
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>>50901418
Could you fuck off with this thread?
I searched for a article source and a reddit thread came up, which linked a twitter post
If true, it's unironically a horrible precedent as the guy is being thrown in jail for the equivalent of a wikipedia summary or a synopsis of the plot, which is all over the internet.
But I don't approve of OP posting such a thread without a proper source.
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>>50903956
Not the OP but here
https://coda-cj.jp/news/2124/
https://www.asahi.com/articles/ASV4J26KYV4JUTIL016M.html
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>>50931246
>source?
see >>50904019
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>>50907424
The Japanese legal system is "the companies are right" and that's about it. It's why when you see people talking about any brand or trademark, they censor a character of the name—even if it's already an unofficial unlicensed abbreviation of the name, like Danmachi. It's also why Nintendo gets away with the most retarded and vague patents that gets them told to fuck off in American courts.
Japan also ruled it was illegal for a video game archivist group to scan magazines for preservation purposes, even if they had no intention to host or redistribute it anywhere.
>>50907713
>monetized site
There's no way his ad revenue exceeded the cost of hosting the site. If he described the shit in a positive way, he might have even attracted people to the series to purchase merchandise from it. And if you want to argue "transcripts", I need to see the length because "over 3000 characters" of Godzilla is fucking nothing.
There's also some irony in this being a "pay to read" article. After all, they're "adapting" an event that happened to someone that they have no legal right to and monetizing it.