Japan has one of the most draconian copyright laws in the world. You can’t even rent your own books or disks unless the copyright holder allows for it. I’ve been puzzled at the fact that they have allowed Let’s Plays (and memes and remixes and doujin works for that matter) for such a long time.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A Japanese court has convicted a man of violating copyright law after he uploaded gameplay and anime videos without publisher permission.

Reported by Japanese paper Asahi Shimbun, the 53-year-old man, Shinobu Yoshida, was sentenced to two years in prison and assessed a 1 million yen fine (or about $6,700 USD.)

Yoshida was arrested in May of this year after uploading gameplay videos of the visual novel Steins;Gate: My Darling’s Embrace back in 2019.

Yoshida also uploaded videos summarizing episodes of the Spy × Family and Steins;Gate anime shows.

CODA characterized the complaint as “malicious cases of posting videos containing content and endings (spoilers) without permission from the rights holders, […] and unfairly gaining advertising revenue through copyright infringement.”

Asahi Shimbun reported that the prosecution stated Yoshida’s actions were, “a malicious act that tramples on the effort of content production.” They argued that because he uploaded videos that condensed and spoiled anime episodes and videos of gameplay from a visual novel — a style of game that focuses on reading to experience the story rather than through gameplay — consumers would be less incentivized to spend money on either.

The original article contains 281 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 33%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

while i think that two years of prison for this is completely ridiculous, a “let’s play” video of a visual novel, it’s essentially the same of “playing” a visual novel

this is one of the reasons i’m afraid to visit japan. not just immigration.

and btw, fair use isn’t a thing over there IIRC. not that would had mattered as gameplay recordings are very derivative.

so ridiculous and sad.

Japan is very bad in terms of copyrighted stuff. If that person lives overseas this would never have happened.

Anyone else suddenly struck by an urge to make let’s plays of stein’s gate in their less draconian copyright law home region?

At this point, aren’t the Japanese stifling any discussion about copyrighted content? This has to be stupid, yes?

It seems to be the trend countries and companies pushing harder against piracy.

Guess where Nintendo puts a lot of money into lobbying… hint: it ain’t China…