Your Japanese university regularly uses torrentfreak?
Streaming is downloading.
I find it hilarious how your university shared a Torrent freak link. But no, streaming is not downloading. If you want to download, use a VPN
– the new law covers manga, as well as any written text it seems (books and academic papers). Anime was always covered.
– as I understand, the law never made a distinction on where the work came from. They probably go after violations of Japanese works and more popular non-Japanese works, but either Japanese or non-Japanese is illegal
Japan is coming pretty damn late to this party. The lesson has already been learned elsewhere, if you suck at making your digital products available and affordable officially, people will get them “unofficially” or not at all.
Anti-piracy doesn’t work, because piracy is nearly never the problem, it’s usually just company dinosaurs not understanding the digital economy and getting mad “the kids” don’t want to pay 50$ for an infinitely sellable digital copy of something that costs less/nothing to reproduce that the original artist is barely getting pennies for anyway.
VPN
based on what my relatives and friends in japan have told me; yes, the japanese government send out warnings to more and more people who they suspect are breaking the copyright law. but in reality their main goal is to shutdown distributors, not people who download or stream from “illegal” sources. people have received mails asking them to stop downloading files and using illegal streaming sites but it usually stops there if you limit your activity to just streaming/downloading. using illegal streaming/torrenting sources it’s far more common than you think (especially among people in their 20’s).
7 comments
Your Japanese university regularly uses torrentfreak?
Streaming is downloading.
I find it hilarious how your university shared a Torrent freak link. But no, streaming is not downloading. If you want to download, use a VPN
– the new law covers manga, as well as any written text it seems (books and academic papers). Anime was always covered.
– as I understand, the law never made a distinction on where the work came from. They probably go after violations of Japanese works and more popular non-Japanese works, but either Japanese or non-Japanese is illegal
– streaming seems to be a point of contention even today, because their definition of downloading relies on being able to reuse the data. This [legal essay](https://www.namura-law.jp/legalessays/%E8%91%97%E4%BD%9C%E6%A8%A9%E6%B3%95%E6%94%B9%E6%AD%A3%EF%BD%9E%E9%81%95%E6%B3%95%E3%83%80%E3%82%A6%E3%83%B3%E3%83%AD%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3%81%AE%E5%AF%BE%E8%B1%A1%E6%8B%A1%E5%A4%A7%E3%81%A8%E5%86%99/#_edn2) seems to say it’s not recommended. Also this is talking about simply watching streams. If you restream something it would clearly be a criminal offence.
Japan is coming pretty damn late to this party. The lesson has already been learned elsewhere, if you suck at making your digital products available and affordable officially, people will get them “unofficially” or not at all.
Anti-piracy doesn’t work, because piracy is nearly never the problem, it’s usually just company dinosaurs not understanding the digital economy and getting mad “the kids” don’t want to pay 50$ for an infinitely sellable digital copy of something that costs less/nothing to reproduce that the original artist is barely getting pennies for anyway.
VPN
based on what my relatives and friends in japan have told me; yes, the japanese government send out warnings to more and more people who they suspect are breaking the copyright law. but in reality their main goal is to shutdown distributors, not people who download or stream from “illegal” sources. people have received mails asking them to stop downloading files and using illegal streaming sites but it usually stops there if you limit your activity to just streaming/downloading. using illegal streaming/torrenting sources it’s far more common than you think (especially among people in their 20’s).
TLDR: the law is almost never enforced.