In the wake of major changes to Japan’s Copyright Law, David Case, Chair of the ACCJ’s Intellectual Property Committee, accessed the knowledge and expertise of Yuji Nagayama, Director, Copyright Division, Japan Copyright Office, Agency for Cultural Affairs. During a special meeting, Nagayama offered detailed insight into some of the amendments to the Copyright Law.
David Case: Mr. Nagayama, I would first like to thank you for coming and speaking to the ACCJ in December. The talk was highly informative and very well received by the audience. During your talk in December, you gave us a very helpful overview of changes to the Copyright Law implemented in January 2010. But before we get to the revisions to the law, could you please speak a bit about the purpose of the Copyright Law in Japan?
Photography by Hiromi Iguchi
Yuji Nagayama: In Japan, the Copyright Law is administered by the Culture Agency. In other countries, it may be the case that other administrative agencies have this responsibility, but I think Japan is unique in that our agency has this role. Hence, the purpose of the Copyright Law is the important need to keep (Japanese) culture intact. To that end, it is important to protect the rights of persons who create cultural works and to ensure that they benefit from their creations.
Likewise, people who support creators of cultural works, such as in the case of music, record companies or management agencies, also need to be protected. This infrastructure for cultural works forms the basis of Copyright Law here in Japan.
Case: The recent revisions to the Copyright Law took effect at the beginning of this year. I am sure there are many points you wish to highlight, but if you were to highlight some of the recent changes, which would you touch upon?
Nagayama: Due to the advent of the Internet, tailoring the Copyright Law to take technological improvements into consideration was one of the challenges in drafting these revisions to the law. But we believe significant strides were made to this end. For example, in the case of search engines, no global rules exist for how search engines may copy, save and transmit copyrighted works as part of search results. In the U.S., fair use rights largely govern how search engines handle copyrighted works.
In Europe, there are cases where the rights holders have the rights to decide how their works are used. In Japan, the law was unsettled and a fair amount of discussion took place between rights holders and users. As such, in the case of Japan, because there was a need to support search engine businesses here, we made rules concerning what can be protected when searching for things on the Internet.
In a nutshell, even without the consent of the rights holders, copyrighted works that are cached on a server or displayed in search results by a search engine are not considered a violation of a rights holder rights. To balance rights holder’s interests, a rights holder can make their website “non-searchable” by placing certain “tags” on their site, and this must be respected by search engines. Also, if a search engine learns that its search results contain infringing goods, it must stop displaying such results.
Something else which has more impact to the everyday lives of people here in Japan is the new provision that users are held liable for downloading copyrighted works that they know have been posted illegally (for example, music). There is no “penalty” per se, but nevertheless, the significance is that people will be aware of what they are doing is legally wrong.
Case: Could you please speak to the revisions to the law that permits the use of copyrighted works for research purposes?
Nagayama: Yes. Large amounts of information collected for the purpose of analyzing data will not be considered a copyright violation. To be more specific, say, for example, a company wanted to copy newspapers from the last 50 years just to analyze how the font of kanji changed over time. This would not be considered a copyright violation to copy the newspapers for such propose. Another example is visual data. If a company were to collect visual images for the purpose of conducting some sort of research, such activity would also allowed.
Case: That was very helpful, Nagayama-san.
Nagayama: Any further questions can be directed to us at: www.mext.go.jp.
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