Copyright laws are very different from country to country. What is normal and perfectly legal in one country may border on illegal in another. Or be illegal altogether. That makes that, in many occasions, things happen that make us hold our hands on our heads. Wondering how such a thing could happen. But what has happened in Japan this time goes far beyond the limit of simply having a different idea of what copyright should cover.
According to reports from the Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s second largest newspaper, a 53-year-old Japanese youtuber named Shinodu Yoshida has been sentenced to two years in prison and fined one million yen for violating Japan’s Copyright Act. Reading this, it is easy to think that this person has broadcast some protected content. And that is only partly true. Because he has been convicted of posting three videos on YouTube between September 2019 and May 2022, one with footage from the 2011 visual novel Steins;Gate: My Darling’s Embrace and an edited video of an anime film.
What led to his indictment and conviction is the video of the video game. The prosecution argued that the Steins;Gate video showed the end of the game and that, with visual novels being less interactive than other types of video games, watching a YouTube video was akin to playing the game and was thus costing the IP owners, Spike Chunsoft, sales. Hence they argued that Yoshida’s actions were malicious actions and causing harm to the content creation effort.
The defense, for its part, merely argued that his intentions were not particularly malicious, requesting that the sentence be suspended. In the end, with little success.
Sentenced to pay one million yen, about 6,320 euros, and to spend two years in prison, suspended for five years, the sentence is considered relatively lenient. Especially considering the harshness of Japanese justice. A system where defense lawyers can spend their entire careers without winning a single case.
Shinodu Yoshida is the first person to be convicted of violating the Copyright Act by distributing videos of a video game. This sets a horrible judicial precedent, which could help video game companies in the future to avoid publishing gameplays of their games on the Internet without their prior consent. A problem that may be much more serious than we can imagine at first glance.
