Japan Copyright Law 2021: Is it the end of Piracy?

Several months ago, exactly on 14 August 2020 (Kissanime / Kissmanga) was closed due to copyright infringement, it was is one of the most popular anime and manga piracy streaming sites, and now after 12 days (01/01/2021), some sites that provide such service are closed, one after another, so what happens ?!

Japan Revised Copyright Law 2020/2021

On June 5th, 2020, the Japanese House of Representatives enacted a law to strengthen copyright and fight piracy of anime, manga, music, and visual content on the Internet, this comes after the Council withdrew a similar law in 2019, because it “imposes extreme restrictions”, it was rewritten to preserve copyright at reasonable limits, and without stopping the growth of the industry, and the law curbs the sites of “piracy and leaks” such as torrent, direct download, and streaming.

Fetching the acts of the law, it enacts a prison sentence as a penalty for establishing a piracy site, or a fine of 5 million yen (approximately 50 thousand dollars), or with both penalties. As for downloading pirated content on your device will be imprisonment for, or a fine of 2 million yen (approximately 20 thousand dollars) Or with both penalties, and the law had been implemented on October 1, 2020, and then entered into force on January 1, 2021.

What you can use and what you can’t

Of course, the law has its exceptions. The law does not forbid you from publishing, for example, one or two pages of a novel with hundreds of pages, nor does it include taking an unintended picture or video of copyrighted content, and parody works such as simulating anime and music videos with a sarcastic nature are also excluded.

As the law has its exceptions, Its loopholes too! Some foreign internet servers tolerate the type of content that can be added to their servers and refuse to disclose the operator information, which means it is impossible to stop these sites that are protected by their servers, and the law also does not include the publication of pirated material in broadcasts platforms, for example, if someone uploaded an anime episode on YouTube, the law does not punish the viewers, because they did not view the content on their devices but rather viewed it on a legal third-party platform (YouTube) even though YouTube does not allow such a violation of intellectual property rights anyway.

Despite all these efforts, it is impossible to completely eliminate piracy, the tools to bypass the blocking will remain available, and the servers that protect their operators and preserve their privacy will remain in operation even if they break the law, but at the same time, no one denies that the Internet will witness a sharp decline in Streaming and Fansub sites, also illegal publishing sites.

There are many who do not want to bear the legal consequences of piracy after the new legislation, and also there are servers that abide by local laws. The server hosting the Kissanime website worried about the legal consequences and closed the piracy site. One of the admins of kissAnime said:

“I am afraid all files on the server are being deleted from the site! This means we will close the site forever, thank you for the past years, mates!”

In the end

The world is fighting piracy because it is costly and causing huge losses to publishers. For example, the Japanese piracy website Mangamura cost publishers estimated losses of 300 billion yen (about 3 billion dollars) before the Japanese government closed it in mid-2018!

You can check Japan: Copyright Laws and Regulations 2021 For Details.

Therefore, we may see an increase in sudden closures and penalties in the coming period, this movement may seem acceptable to anime fans in regions such as Europe, the United States, and Japan, as piracy is an unjustified theft, as there are many official publishers in these areas, and multiple options for legal viewing. But in other regions, the legal options for watching anime and manga are weak and almost non-existent, and if they exist, then they promote only a few popular anime and manga. So will the legal options for watching anime and reading manga will improve in the coming period? Will these systems be able to combat piracy?

Originally published at https://allanimangas.blogspot.com on January 24, 2021.