chosaq

Japan Times article on recent net related legislative developments

A quick pointer to a Japan Times article about some of the issues mentioned in my last entry. Chris Salzberg, of Global Voices and Gyaku.jp fame, was so nice to include a quote from a recent conversation we had about this issue :-)

The problem, however, is that everything on the Web is downloaded. Just to view a page, a browser must store its contents on the user’s computer. Since it is impossible to know beforehand whether downloaded content is legal or not, any page view would, under the proposed revision, place the user at risk of violating copyright law.

Andreas Bovens, a Tokyo-based Belgian who blogs on copyright issues in Japan at chosaq.net, sees a danger in this situation.

“It seems like the main targets of this proposed new legislation are Web sites offering unauthorized chaku-uta (ring tone) or music downloads,” he says. “The message they seem to want to bring across is that downloading from those sites is illegal.

“However, although the scope of this legislation seems small, its effect is huge. It affects basically everything that we do on the Net.”