Police Arrest 18 Alleged Movie, Music and Software Uploaders

[Ceewan]

Reprinted directly from torrentfreak:

This week, Japanese police have been carrying out raids all over the country against individuals alleged to have uploaded copyright works to the Internet. In total, 18 people were arrested for sharing movies, anime, music, games and software.

For the last few weeks Japan’s Anti-Counterfeiting Association (ACA) has been busy monitoring the country’s file-sharers looking for copyright infringers. After handing over their findings to the authorities, this week the police took action.

In an operation starting Tuesday this week and ending Friday, police targeted 50 locations around Japan and ultimately arrested a total of 18 individuals.

The ACA, an organization made up of various trade groups including the Recording Industry Association of Japan, International Motion Picture Copyright Association and various other film, music and software entities, said the raids followed a similar but smaller operation in November last year. In that action, 11 people were arrested and according to ACA, all have been convicted.

As appears to be customary in these cases, the RIAJ – the Japanese equivalent of the RIAA – has taken the step of publishing a list of the ages, sex, locations, occupations and copyright works said to have been shared by the 18 individuals.

They range from a 25 year-old taxi driver from Tokyo sharing Cross Game, Dragon Ball Kai, Evangelion, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Gundam 00 Second Season, to a 58 year-old construction worker sharing IBM Homepage Builder 12 and input method editor ATOK 2010.

What is striking about the arrests is that none of the accused appear to be heavy uploaders – the ‘worst’ pair appear to have uploaded 6 games, 2 comics and 4 music tracks between them.

While downloading in Japan was previously permitted for personal use, both up and downloading of copyright works are now expressly illegal.

 

[cattz]

Judging it by some of the sources for new material like anime/AV, only 199,982 to go for them.

:negligent:

 

[vincent_z]

Looks like it's time for Japan's uploaders to learn about anonymous proxies. :...:

 

[Ceewan]

Do You Prefer Copyright or the Right to Talk in Private?

[highlight]Reprinted from Rick Falkvinge at torrentfreak here:[/highlight]


Five years ago, when I founded the Swedish and first Pirate Party, we set three pillars for our policy: shared culture, free knowledge, and fundamental privacy. These were themes that were heard as ideals in the respected activist circles. I had a gut feeling that they were connected somehow, but it would take another couple months for me to connect the dots between the right to fundamental liberty of privacy and the right to share culture.

The connection was so obvious once you had made it, it’s still one of our best points:

Today’s level of copyright can’t coexist with the right to communicate in private.

If I’m sending an e-mail to you, that e-mail may contain a piece of music. If we are in a video chat, I may drop a copyrighted video clip there for both of us to watch. The only way to detect this, in order to enforce today’s level of copyright, is to eliminate the right to private correspondence. That is, to eavesdrop on all ones and zeros going to and from all computers.

There is no way to allow the right to private correspondence for some type of content, but not for other types: you must break the seal and analyze the contents to sort it into allowed and disallowed. At that point, the seal is broken. Either there is a seal on everything, or on nothing.

So we are down to a crossroads. We, as a society, can say that copyright is the most important thing we have, and give up the right to talk in private. Either that, or we say that the right to private correspondence has greater value, in which case such correspondence can be used to transfer copyrighted works. There is no middle ground.

Once you accept that copyright must be scaled back, a whole palette of advantages to that scenario become apparent. Two billion human beings would have 24/7 access to all of humanity’s collective knowledge and culture. That’s a much larger leap for civilization than when public libraries arrived in 1850. No public cost or new tax is involved. All the infrastructure is already in place. The technology has been developed, and the tools are deployed: all we have to do is lift the ban on using them.

What surprised me recently was the level of understanding of this within the copyright industry, and how they persistently try to eradicate the right to private correspondence in order to safeguard current disputed levels of copyright.

A cable leaked by WikiLeaks just before Christmas outlined a checklist given to the Swedish government with demands from the US copyright industry, IIPA. The U.S. Embassy was quite appreciative of how the Swedish justice department was “fully on board” and had made considerable progress on the demands against its own citizens, but in favor of the US copyright industry.

In those demands were pretty much every big-brother law enacted in the past several years. Data retention, IPRED, three strikes, police access to IP records for petty crimes, abolishment of the mere conduit messenger immunity, everything was in there.

It became clear that the copyright industry is actively driving a Big Brother society, as it understands that this path would be the only way to save copyright.

Myself, I think it’s more than time to throw that industry out of the legislative process.