Japan Cartoonists Association Formally Responds to Efforts to Expand Japanese Copyright Law

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A subcommittee of Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs recently agreed on a plan to expand the scope of copyright law. Downloading anime images, illustrations, and photographs that are illegally posted to personal blogs and Twitter accounts would also be illegal, as would copying and pasting song lyrics. The laws would not be limited to directly downloading images themselves — taking screenshots of illegally uploaded media would also be against the new laws.

The Japan Cartoonists Association released a formal statement on Wednesday in response to the laws: "We ask that due deliberation is taken to ensure that the expansion [of copyright law] does not impede civil rights such as research and freedom of expression."

The Association said that it understood that the law was targeting illegal sites, but that certain improvements need to be made. The statement offered the following suggestions to lawmakers:

1) The law should address repeat offenders

2) The law should address the illegal uploading and sharing of manga with no alterations of content

3) The law should only target cases where the rights holder's profits are negatively affected

Several manga artists complained about the motion to expand Copyright law on Twitter immediately after the news circulated. They expressed worries that the law was too vague, and that fan activities could be negatively affected. Negima! artist Ken Akamatsu said that he hopes that the Agency for Cultural Affairs will listen to the objecting voices of the manga artists, among others.

English: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2019-03-02/japan-cartoonists-association-formally-responds-to-efforts-to-expand-japanese-copyright-law/.144020
Japanese source: https://www.nihonmangakakyokai.or.jp/?tbl=information&id=7718
 
is a Reindeer
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Points 2 and 3 seem like positives in MangaDex's favor, given that scanlation would count as an alteration of content and that we aren't negatively impacting profits.
 
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well, scanlation negatively impacting profit to right holder
many of fan, never buy physical book published legal in his/her country
 
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scanlation would count as an alteration of content

Would it? Translating and redrawing is an alteration, sure. But the content itself i.e. the manga remains unchanged. It's not like you're creating a different manga. Making a really good, word for word, dub for an anime doesn't alter the content of that anime, does it?

I agree with you on point 3, although I'm afraid people could argue against that.
 
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There's a bigger issue at stake here, which is why the artists are against it.

Right now in Japanese copyright law, the work of manga artists is theirs. Eichiro Oda, owns One Piece, for example, even though it's being distributed and released in Shonen JUMP. (Unlike creators of American comics, whose work is owned by the comic companies who hired and paid them.) However, under proposed revisions to the copyright law, editors (ie The Company) would now be considered co-creators, and have ownership of the manga as well. It's basically a way to strip manga creators of some control of their works and give it to the publishers, who can then do what they want with the properties.

For more information: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17510694.2018.1563420
 
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If you are scanlating a manga into a completely different language when no one else is, you can't logically claim that they are subordinate to someone who's not contributing. Another way to think of it is that if it did not exist prior to your efforts, it most definitely counts as an alteration of content at minimum.

Somebody might come up with a different argument eventually (or perhaps already has and I haven't seen it yet), but I've never yet seen anyone overcome the wall of "if people have a right to the work they do, and the original author and publisher don't have any part in/produce any competition to the work of scanlators, then the scanlators have a right to the scanlations they make and the original author/publisher do not."
 
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i was lead to believe Japanese copyright law was already pretty fuckin strict, at least if the amount of "Bcdonalds" and "Farbucks" that manga characters visit is anything to go off of
 
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The law should address the illegal uploading and sharing of manga with no alterations of content

Wait, doesn't this mean that I can just put a single white pixel on the top right corner an entire episode of Mob Psycho 100, upload it to my blog then claim that I have "altered it" such that I'm not a pirate?

This law is way too vague! They should at least say "meaningful alteration".
 
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@dankdevice
i was lead to believe Japanese copyright law was already pretty fuckin strict, at least if the amount of "Bcdonalds" and "Farbucks" that manga characters visit is anything to go off of

I believe that has to do with trademark, not copyright, which is slightly different. That name replacing thing is a common thing in media, not only in Japan :^)
 
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Blah blah blah, it's also illegal since the begining of the internet to download unaltered versions of movies and video games.
Last time I checked, the law is far from being applicated.

When a king falls, another is born. that's the rule of the internet. Nothing news.
 
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You can perhaps make that argument for scanlations of manga licensed in non-Japanese languages, but regardless of how big a fan I am of a certain series, I'm not going to buy a physical copy of a manga I can't read. So regardless if that series is scanlated, if there's no way for me to legally buy it in a language I can read, then there's no lost profits from the non-Japanese reading audience.

Edit: Sorry, I just realized that you were talking about licensed manga. Still, the percentage of series I follow here that are licensed is fairly small, and some of those I do get legally through Crunchyroll. There's also the argument that most readers wouldn't by a series even if there was no scanlation of it, because if they can't get it for free, they won't read it at all. If anything, this could mean that scanlation makes the publisher more money, because readers who are inclined to purchase would never have found the series in the first place if it wasn't for the scanlation. This was the case for me at least with a few series I've actually purchased, though I'll admit that I've only purchased a very, very small percentage of the total manga I've read.
 

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