Japanese Copyright Law

by Tim Lee on September 5, 2007 · Comments

Via Marc Andreessen comes the latest silly example of a foreign government trying to use industrial policy to help its companies catch up to the Silicon Valley. I’ll give you three guesses on how well this plan will work.

Of course, making fun of foreign governments and their search engine projects is old hat here on TLF. More interesting, from my perspective, is this tidbit:

Some blame Japan’s copyright laws for holding back the development of web services. Services such as Google hold copies of other companies’ web pages on their servers. Because Japanese law forbids the duplication of copyrighted works without the rights holders’ permission, Yahoo Japan, Google Japan and other search engines offered in Japan operate from US-based servers.

One wonders how the Internet might have evolved had a similar rule been imposed on the United States in the mid-1990s.

Comments Posted in: Copyright

  • Timon
    Actually, there is a very good case that Google's original indexing was an infringement of copyright. It is hard to see how duplicating copyrighted material and creating a derivative commercial product is not at least potentially an infringing use, and in the early days Stanford's internet administrator often had to take calls about the proto-googlebot downloading huge amounts of copyrighted material. Google was absolutely a pirate company in other so-called "intellectual property" areas as well. Their entire business model was ripped off a patented technique from rival Overture. I think they eventually paid some extortion money but the point is they didn't ask and didn't care, just like with their pirate print and news services.

    And on the release day of the iPod, does anyone doubt that "rip, mix, burn" would have constituted an "inducement" to infringement under the Grokster standard?

    The point is that by the time lawyers are even aware of your issue it is too late. Google and Apple got away with it because no one understood what they were up to and by the time they did it was too late to refuse to deal with them, as news and music companies would like to be able to.
  • Wow, I'm impressed by the stupidity of that law, but it seems to be true
    http://www.webmasterworld.com/asia_pacific_sear...

    (I'm completely unsurprised by the swing from state prohibition to promotion.)

    So if such laws existed in the US, search would have developed elsewhere, subject to US influence.

    If such laws existed wordlwide, web search would be another illegal (and not very good relative to Google) P2P application.
  • John Jackson
    If this is true about Japanese law, how do their computers work without violating the law? Don't they have a copy of the copyrighted works in RAM or in a disk cache? Or do they scramble them so they aren't an exact duplicate?
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