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Stories filed under: "japan"

Speculation: Patent At Heart Of ‘Palworld’ Suit Could Be For Capturing Characters With A Ball

from the patently-absurd dept

As we just talked about the joint lawsuit filed in Japan by Nintendo and The Pokémon Co. against Pocketpair, the company behind the hit game Palworld, we still don’t have all the details. But one of the strange things about the suit is that is not a copyright or trademark suit, which is what everyone expected as soon as the game launched. Instead, this is supposedly a patent infringement suit, with the plaintiffs claiming that Palworld infringes on several of their patents. This led everyone from the folks at Pocketpair itself to the public to ask the obvious question: what patents?

Nintendo and The Pokémon Co. have yet to provide this detail, so we’re in the speculative stage at the moment. That being said, if this really is a patent infringement suit, some commentators out there believe they have found the likely culprits, which are several divisional patents recently filed for with the USPTO.

Kiyoshi Kurihara, a Japanese patent attorney and consultant on intellectual property spoke to Yahoo Japan on the lawsuit (translated by Automaton), and pointed to a “killer patent” that revolves around the mechanic of catching Pokémon itself.

“It seems like it would be hard to avoid if you want to make a Pokémon-like game, and it’s easy to infringe if you’re not careful,” Kurihara is quoted as saying.

The way a divisional patent works is to isolate specific aspects within a parent patent. This tends to happen when a single parent patent contains multiple protected elements, then divided out in the divisional patents. The patent that Kurihara and many others are pointing to in this case is Japanese Patent No. 7545191, which essentially covers the game mechanic of capturing a character with a “capture item”, in this case a Poké Ball.

Aiming a capture item (Poké Ball) at a character placed on the field (Pokémon), releasing the capture item in a direction determined by player input, judgment of whether capturing is successful or not upon contact between the capture item and Pokémon, and changing of the Pokémon’s status to “owned by the player” when capturing is successful. In addition, the patent also covers the mechanic of having capture probability displayed to the player, regardless of whether it uses colors, graphics or numbers.

While the divisional patents were just filed for weeks ago, likely in preparation for this lawsuit, the parent patent has been held since 2021. Because of that, it would still be valid to use against Pocketpair.

Although you have to wonder just how valid this patent is, not to mention why the plaintiffs haven’t wielded it against others. Is throwing a ball to capture a character really patent worthy? Is it really a mechanic invented by Nintendo and The Pokémon Co.? Hell, the Ghostbusters video game came out in 2009 and, as in the movies, involves a capture device you have to toss at ghosts and then guide them into it. That was well before the 2021 patent was granted.

Kurihara hinted at some of this in his comments above. A patent like this would preclude anyone from making a game that is inspired by Pokémon games. It would also be very easy to infringe upon unintentionally, given its real or potential broad use in the gaming industry.

And regardless of how this lawsuit shakes out, this sure looks like Nintendo and The Pokémon Co. scratching and clawing for any excuse to sue the competition. Maybe it would be better to just compete instead.

Filed Under: japan, palworld, patents, poke ball, pokemon, prior art, throwing a ball
Companies: nintendo, pocketpair, pokemon company

Nintendo, Pokémon Co. Sue Pocketpair Over ‘Palworld’ For… Patent Infringement?

from the a-patent-for-what-exactly? dept

Well, it took awhile, but we finally got here. Earlier this year, we discussed the game Palworld shortly after its release. It made our pages because the game is clearly partially inspired by the Pokémon series of video games, with some very stark differences. Similarities aside, the characters in the game are certainly different than those in Pokémon games, coupled with the use of firearms in the game along with other game mechanics that made it demonstrably different than any other game. As we highlighted at the time, this made Palworld something of an example of how the idea/expression dichotomy works and we warned that, while Nintendo or The Pokémon Co. might eventually pursue legal action over the game, a copyright suit ought to have a hard time surviving a defense using that dichotomy.

Which is why, while I wasn’t terribly surprised to learn that Nintendo and The Pokémon Co. have in fact sued Pocketpair over its Palworld game, I sure wasn’t expecting to learn that it was doing so over patent infringement.

Nintendo and The Pokémon Company announced they have filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against Pocketpair, the makers of the heavily Pokémon-inspired Palworld. The Tokyo District Court lawsuit seeks an injunction and damages “on the grounds that Palworld infringes multiple patent rights,” according to the announcement.

Beyond mere copyright concerns, though, Nintendo’s lawsuit announcement specifically alleges patent infringement on the part of Palworld (though this difference could come down to vagaries of translation from the original Japanese). A lawsuit over patents would seemingly require some unique game mechanic or feature that has been specifically granted stronger protections by the patent office. While the Pokémon Company does hold a number of (US) patents, most of them seem to deal with various server communications methods or the sleep monitoring capabilities of Pokémon Sleep.

Adding to the mystery in all of this is that nobody but the plaintiffs seems to have any idea what these patents that were infringed upon could be. I tend to agree that perhaps there’s a translation issue at work here and this really is instead a copyright and/or trademark infringement suit, but we’ll have to wait for more to come out to see.

If it is patents, I’ll be surprised. I’ll be even more surprised if there is any validity to such a patent infringement claim. That’s just not typically how these things in the video game industry work.

But if it really is a trademark and/or copyright claim, it should fail and fail hard… if this suit were brought in the United States. In Japan, however, it’s more complicated. Japanese copyright law does not have an explicit idea/expression dichotomy in the way US copyright law has, but the courts there do sometimes give a nod to and use it in a similar way.

But any sane copyright law would allow for games to be inspired by, but not replicas of, an original work. The whole point of copyright generally is not to allow any one entity own the concepts that go into a video game, but instead the specific expression of the same. And, for what it’s worth, Pocketpair too appears to be confused as to what this is all about.

“We have received notice of this lawsuit and will begin the appropriate legal proceedings and investigations into the claims of patent infringement,” Pocketpair says in a statement. “At this moment, we are unaware of the specific patents we are accused of infringing upon, and we have not been notified of such details.”

And so now we wait to see what the actual details here are. Frankly, sans some translation issue, none of this makes much sense to me. And while Nintendo and The Pokémon Co. certainly have shown themselves to be willing to stretch IP laws to be the bully generally, this seems to go beyond the norm.

Filed Under: copyright, idea expression dichotomy, japan, palworld, patents, pokemon, satire, trademark, video games
Companies: nintendo, pocketpair, pokemon company

Streamer In Japan Gets 2 Years Jail Time For Uploading Let’s Plays, Anime Spoilers

from the bonkers dept

Long time Techdirt readers may recall the iterative changes that Japanese copyright laws have undergone over the course of the last several years. While they aren’t the only changes to have occurred, the topline summary was to turn copyright infringement from a predominantly civil law issue into a criminal one, particularly in cases that prosecutors can identify as not falling under the following provision in the Japanese constitution:

An act unavoidably performed to avert a present danger to the life, body, liberty or property of oneself or any other person is not punishable only when the harm produced by such act does not exceed the harm to be averted.

In other words, if you’re not avoiding more harm than you’re causing by committing copyright infringement, you have the potential to face years in prison if convicted, along with fines. All the more so, apparently, if you’re infringing on the manga or anime industry’s content.

And now these changes to the laws are having the real world effect of putting people in jail for the crime of the kind of copyright infringement that might not even lead to a conviction here in America. One man was just sentenced to 2 years in prison for uploading and monetizing some YouTube videos that were let’s plays and summaries of animes.

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. According to a press release from the Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), a Japanese anti-piracy trade group, the complaint apparently stemmed from the fact that Yoshida monetized the videos, which violated a Japanese law that prohibits making money off copyrighted material. Yoshida also uploaded videos summarizing episodes of the Spy × Family and Steins;Gate anime shows.

The differences between American copyright laws and Japanese laws are bonkers. As I stated in the opening, there is a very real chance that uploading let’s plays and anime summaries, even if those summaries used some footage from the anime, would fall under fair use protections. Less so with let’s plays, probably, but let’s plays are also generally permitted by a large portion of the video game industry, seeing them as doing more good than harm to those games in terms of interest in them and sales.

In the case of this man and what he uploaded, the main impetus for wanting him jailed appears mostly to be, spoiler alert, spoilers.

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. According to Shimbun, this is the first time such a conviction has occurred in Japan.

Spoilers got a man 2 years of jail time. Just let that sink in. And, yes, the source article does note that Yoshida acknowledged to the court that he knew his actions were violating the law when he did them… but so what? That doesn’t in any way change the notion that criminalizing copyright infringement in this way is absolutely absurd. And if the monetization was the key issue here, well, YouTube does provide a way for rightsholders to demonetize videos like these and even yoink the monetization for themselves.

All of that would be better than a man in his fifties rotting in jail for two years over some anime spoilers.

Filed Under: anime, copyright, criminal copyright, japan, let's play, shinobu yoshida, spoilers, steins;gate

from the eureka! dept

Finally! We’ve been covering famed burger chain In-N-Out’s longstanding bullshit tactic for retaining trademark rights all over the world by standing up popup locations briefly once every couple of years just to satisfy the requirements to use the mark in commerce. What is far too common in the coverage about lawsuits or threats of suits that the chain has lobbed at international businesses it feels are infringing on those mostly unused trademarks is any recognition in the press that this is pure trademark tourism. In fact, in many cases, the press coverage will include speculation about whether all of this means that In-N-Out is finally going international.

But In-N-Out’s latest international popup was so absurdly brief in its appearance that the Japanese press appears to have caught the plot.

On June 7, Californian burgers briefly interrupted the Tokyo workday. The culty American chain In-N-Out landed in Ebisu for a pop-up that lasted four hours. A reported 1,000 people turned up for the limited menu of just three items. And as quickly as it came, it went, leaving a wake of people on social media distraught that they hadn’t gotten the memo in time.

Yup, 3 menu items were on offer over the course of four hours to serve roughly a thousand patrons. I’ll give In-N-Out this much credit: it’s not even trying to pretend that this is about doing any real business in Japan. Separately, while the company declined to comment on whether the popup was designed purely to retain several trademarks the company has in Japan, that didn’t stop The Japan Times from filling in the blanks for its readers.

In 2017, trademark lawyer Chris Maher, then working for legal firm King & Wood Mallesons, wrote about the company, noting that in Australia, trademarks can be challenged and revoked if the registrants don’t show activity in the country for three years. He argued that In-N-Out’s pop-up tactic would qualify as an activity that would let it protect its trademark, but that it would have to keep coming back every few years — which is exactly what it has done.

Maher points out in an email that the three-item menu served in Ebisu directly reflects the company’s trademark portfolio. Fries aren’t registered, and fries weren’t served; neither were three- or four-patty burgers, or grilled cheese.

So, no, In-N-Out is not expanding to Japan. Or Australia. Or Canada. Or South Korea. Or, hell, the East Coast of the United States. It will visit those places now and then purely to retain its trademarks, like that one family member who needs to come visit for a week every couple of years to get back on their feet after losing their job yet again, but that’s about it.

Filed Under: japan, popup, trademark
Companies: in-n-out

Chinese Authorities Demand Global Censorship Of Protest Anthem ‘Glory To Hong Kong’

from the they-never-learn dept

It’s hardly a secret that the Chinese government is obsessed with controlling everything that its citizens see or do online — Techdirt has written dozens of stories on the topic over the years. But control within China’s borders isn’t enough, it seems: the authorities there now want the ability to censor material globally. The latest move concerns ‘Glory To Hong Kong’, which Wikipedia describes as:

a protest song that was composed and written by a musician under the pseudonym “Thomas dgx yhl”, with the contribution of a group of Hongkonger netizens from the online forum LIHKG during the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests. It was initially written in Cantonese and was eventually developed into various language versions starting with English.

It became the unofficial anthem of the pro-democracy protests, and was considered powerful enough to warrant an explicit ban in Hong Kong’s extreme National Security Law, passed in 2020. Now the Chinese authorities, through their proxies in the Hong Kong government, are seeking to censor the song from online services, reported here by the Guardian:

Variations of the song distributed by DGX Music, the team of creators who own the rights to the title, were no longer available on Spotify, Apple’s iTunes, Facebook and KKBOX worldwide on Wednesday, though a rendition performed by a Taiwanese band still remained. Several music videos were also accessible on YouTube on Thursday.

In a social media post on Wednesday, DGX Music said it was handling “technical issues unrelated to the streaming platforms” and apologised for the “temporary impact”.

Those “technical issues” are in fact legal ones. Article 19 explains:

On 6 June, the Hong Kong government sought a court order banning the ‘broadcasting, performing, printing, publishing, selling, offering for sale, distributing, disseminating, displaying or reproducing in any way’ the protest anthem which the government claims constitutes secession. The injunction would block, and potentially criminalise, all internet intermediaries, from the streaming media platforms [Apple’s iTunes, Spotify, Facebook and Instagram’s Reels] to YouTube and Google, from providing access to the song for Hong Kong internet users.

Two weeks later, 24 human rights and digital rights groups wrote an open letter (pdf) to the Internet companies affected, asking them to oppose the injunction. They point out that this is the latest move to extend China’s online control and censorship around the world:

We note with heightened concern that this injunction would be used to censor “Glory to Hong Kong” globally, building on the growing tendency of Hong Kong authorities to apply abusive laws for actions committed outside Hong Kong’s territory. In June 2023, Hong Kong authorities charged a 23-year-old Hong Kong woman with “doing … acts with seditious intention” for Facebook posts that advocate Hong Kong independence while she was studying in Japan. The Hong Kong government was responsible for 50 instances in which Meta said it was forced to remove content globally between July 2020 and June 2022.

Facebook may have caved on those occasions, but to its credit Google refused to change its search results to display China’s national anthem, rather than the protest song, when users search for Hong Kong’s national anthem. We should have a better idea of what the Internet companies affected intend to do in this case on 21 July, when the first Hong Kong High Court hearing takes place. The stakes are high: if they agree to censor the protest anthem, China will be encouraged to demand more global takedowns of material it doesn’t like. On a more positive note, it seems that the Streisand Effect applies just as strongly here as elsewhere:

The attempt to ban the song outright pushed it to the top of the charts in Apple’s iTunes store in Hong Kong last week as people rushed to download the title.

They never learn.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon.

Filed Under: anthem, censorship, china, glory to hong kong, hong kong, itunes, japan, pro-democracy, protests, streaming, streisand effect, thomas dgz yhl
Companies: apple, google, meta, spotify

Serious Investors And A Web3 Takeover Have Come To The Mastodon World: Is That Good Or Bad?

from the Gmail-moment dept

In one of Mike’s recent posts about the radical reshaping of the social media landscape currently underway, he noted that Mastodon/ActivityPub might have a “Gmail moment“, when bigger players enter and boost the sector. Although that could be good in terms of broadening the appeal of Mastodon, the emergence of huge, dominating “instances” (Mastodon servers) might undermine the federated approach that makes Mastodon so interesting.

That’s not the only danger for the Mastodon world. The sudden emergence of Mastodon as a popular alternative to Twitter has inevitably attracted the attention of people with lots of spare money looking to invest in the Next Big Thing. The German software developer Eugen Rochko, the person who created the Mastodon software, told the Financial Times (non-paywalled version on Ars Technica) that he had received offers from more than five US-based investors who were keen to put “hundreds of thousands of dollars” into his project:

But he said the platform’s non-profit status was “untouchable,” adding that Mastodon’s independence and the choice of moderation styles across its servers were part of its attraction.

“Mastodon will not turn into everything you hate about Twitter,” said Rochko. “The fact that it can be sold to a controversial billionaire, the fact that it can be shut down, go bankrupt and so on. It’s the difference in paradigms [between the platforms].”

Rochko runs one of the biggest Mastodon instances, mastodon.social (disclosure: it’s the one I use). Another big instance is pawoo.net:

Pawoo, operated from Japan since 2017, is the second largest instance of Mastodon. It has drawn users from all over the world including illustrators, anime fans, novelists, and music enthusiasts since its inception. Accumulating around 800K users, Pawoo has become a “place to enjoy creative activity and unfettered communication.” The Pawoo acquisition marks another milestone of the Mask team towards the building of a decentralized social network and a free, open internet.

That description is in a press release from Mask. Few people in the West have heard about pawoo.net, even if they use Mastodon. That’s because on mastodon.social and many other instances, access to pawoo.net is “limited” as a result of “inappropriate content”. The complex saga of why pawoo.net is mostly disconnected from the rest of the fediverse is described in a long post on the Ansuz blog, written by Matthew Skala. As the blog post explains, the “inappropriate content” of pawoo.net involves sexualized drawings of children, which are unacceptable and probably illegal in much of the West, but largely unproblematic in Japan, where the majority of pawoo.net’s users are based.

Rochko may not be interested in selling some or all of Mastodon and mastodon.social, but the purchase of pawoo.net underlines the fact that those running other servers may be willing to do so. Pawoo.net has been bought by Mask Network, which describes itself as bringing “privacy and benefits from Web3 to social media like Facebook & Twitter – with an open-sourced browser extension.” The roots of Mask Network are in the world of cryptocurrencies – it even has its own native token, Mask – so we may be about to see an infusion of Web3 ideas on this particular instance.

The federated nature of the Mastodon means that it is hard to stop this kind of experimentation and commercialization, even if bans are imposed by other instances that are against this shift. How all this works out over the coming months and years is one of the key issues facing the burgeoning world of Mastodon and ActivityPub.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon or Twitter.

Filed Under: activitypub, cryptocurrency, eugen rochko, fediverse, japan, mastodon, tokens, web3
Companies: google, mask network

Twitter Reports Spike In Government Data Requests, Including Double The Amount Targeting Journalists

from the usual-suspects-involved-but,-you-know,-more-often dept

Governments love targeting Twitter for user data requests, but apparently now more than ever. The latest Twitter transparency report says new records are being set in the data request sector.

The social network saw “record highs” in the number of account data requests during the July-December 2021 reporting period, with 47,572 legal demands on 198,931 accounts.

The worse news is targeting of journalists is also on the rise.

The media in particular faced much more pressure. Government demands for data from verified news outlets and journalists surged 103 percent compared to the last report, with 349 accounts under scrutiny.

The full report [PDF] (also available in web form) breaks down the countries targeting journalists the most. And it’s the countries you would expect.

This spike is largely attributed to legal demands submitted by India (114), Turkey (78), Russia (55), and Pakistan (48).

Demands from Russia will likely fall off precipitously now that Twitter is blocked in the country (along with Facebook), a move made shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine. Turkey has always had a thing for persecuting journalists, so business there should remain steady. India has its own problems with bringing Twitter in line with its aggressive censorship efforts. That number could fluctuate dramatically in the coming months, depending on the outcome of Twitter’s legal challenge of the country’s ridiculous content moderation demands.

The usual suspects are also involved in demands for content blocking, led by a somewhat surprising (but perennial) contender.

97% of the total global volume of legal demands originated from only five countries (in decreasing order): Japan, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, and India. These five countries have remained Twitter’s top requesting countries for legal demands over the past three years.

Apparently, Japan is fighting crime via Twitter, something it has done often enough to secure the top spot for three years running.

Japan continues to submit the highest volume of requests, and was responsible for half of all global legal demands received in this period. 96% of requests from Japan referred to laws regarding the prohibition of financial crimes, narcotics, and prostitution.

Either Japan has plenty of Twitter-using criminals or this is a cheap, but ultimately wasteful, effort that has done little to deter Japanese users from engaging in these crimes and posting about them on Twitter.

The good news is Twitter is pushing back where it can.

It denied 31 percent of US data requests, and either narrowed or shut down 60 percent of global demands. Twitter also opposed 29 civil attempts to identify anonymous US users, citing First Amendment reasons.

It’s also still fighting to be allowed to report US national security related requests in more detail, a legal battle it has been engaged in since 2014. In addition to challenged National Security Letter gag orders, Twitter is hoping to provide more information than the mostly meaningless “bands” that only allow the public to guesstimate how often the government targets Twitter with these orders.

As for user data demands, the US still leads the way — something that’s likely due to the relative convenience of Twitter being US-based and, therefore, easier to approach.

The United States submitted the most government information requests during this reporting period, accounting for 20% of the global volume, and 39% of the global accounts specified. The second highest volume of requests originated from India, comprising 19% of global information requests and 27% of the global accounts specified.

Japan (17%) and France (17%) and Germany (6%) round out the top five countries by volume. Combined, these five countries accounted for 79% of all global information requests during this reporting period. This is the second report in a row in which these countries represent the top five global requesters (in varying order).

The spike in demands doesn’t track with Twitter user base growth. Twitter only added about 33 million users worldwide last year, an increase of less than 10%. Governments are the real growth industry here. And that means Twitter will continue to spend more on compliance without the apparent ability to offset the costs with user growth or sustained profitability. Somehow an extremely online car salesman temporarily convinced himself he wanted to make these problems his own, which kind of demonstrates the difference between being smart and being wise.

Filed Under: government requests, japan, journalism, pakistan, privacy, south korea, surveillance, transparency, turkey, united states
Companies: twitter

Are ‘Fast Movies’ Really A Substitute For The Real Thing? Or Just Good Marketing?

from the psst:-they're-good-marketing dept

There’s an interesting post on the TorrentFreak blog about “fast movies“:

These heavily edited copies of mainstream movies aim to summarize key plot lines via voice-over narration in about 10 minutes. While no replacement for the real thing, these edits accumulated millions of views and incurred the wrath of rightsholders, leading to the arrest of three people in Japan.

As that rightly points out, fast movies are not a substitute for watching the entire film. An earlier report on the same Web site indicates that the Japanese film industry disagrees:

the losses cited by rightsholders are huge – 95 billion yen (US$ 856.7m) in the past 12 months alone, roughly $10 per ‘fast movie’ view when working in the 80 million views cited by CODA [a Japanese anti-piracy organisation].

This seems to be the classic “lost sales” fallacy – that every unauthorized copy of a work represents a $10 sale that didn’t happen. That’s unrealistic: many people browse movie clips online out of curiosity, and never had any intention of paying to watch the entire film. As the US District Judge James P. Jones wrote in a criminal copyright case in 2008, reported by Ars Technica:

Those who download movies and music for free would not necessarily purchase those movies and music at the full purchase price. [A]lthough it is true that someone who copies a digital version of a sound recording has little incentive to purchase the recording through legitimate means, it does not necessarily follow that the downloader would have made a legitimate purchase if the recording had not been available for free.

There’s another important angle, missing even from the judge’s wise words. The “lost sales” view completely overlooks the “gained sales” that also result from people discovering new titles in these ways. They may use the latter as a taster, and then go on to make a purchase that they had not originally been planning. That seems likely to happen in the case of the “fast movies”, since they are not only much shorter than the original, they typically have only a voice-over instead of the full audio track.

For a film that is worth watching, the “fast movie” versions act as excellent marketing material. Rather than suing the people who make these kind of trailers, maybe the Japanese film industry should support them.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon. Originally posted to Walled Culture.

Filed Under: copyright, fast movies, japan, lost sales

YouTube Dusts Off Granular National Video Blocking To Assist YouTuber Feuding With Toei Animation

from the 'bout-time dept

Hopefully, you will recall our discussion about one YouTuber, Totally Not Mark, suddenly getting flooded with 150 copyright claims on his YouTube channel all at once from Toei Animation. Mark’s channel is essentially a series of videos that discuss, critique, and review anime. Toei Animation produces anime, including the popular Dragon Ball series. While notable YouTuber PewDiePie weighed in with some heavy criticism over how YouTube protects its community in general from copyright claims, the real problem here was one of location. Matt is in Ireland, while Toei Animation is based out of Japan. Japan has terrible copyright laws when it comes to anything resembling fair use, whereas Ireland is governed by fair dealing laws. In other words, Matt’s use was just fine in Ireland, where he lives, but would not be permitted in Japan. Since YouTube is a global site, takedowns have traditionally been global.

Well, Matt has updated the world to note that he was victorious in getting his videos restored and cleared, with a YouTube rep working directly with him on this.

But shortly after, as Fitzpatrick revealed in a new video providing an update on the legal saga, someone “high up at YouTube’’ who wished to remain anonymous, reached out to him via Discord. Fitzpatrick said the contact not only apologized for his situation not being addressed sooner, but divulged a prior conflict between YouTube and Toei regarding his videos fair use status.

“I’m not going to lie, hearing a human voice that felt both sincerely eager to help and understanding of this impossible situation felt like a weight lifted off my shoulders,” Fitzpatrick said.

Hey, Twitch folks, if you’re reading this, this is how it is done. But it isn’t the whole story. Before the videos were claimed and blocked, Toei had requested that YouTube manually take Matt’s videos offline. YouTube pushed back on Toei, asking for more information on its requested takedowns, specifically asking if the company had considered fair use/fair dealing laws in its request. Alongside that, YouTube also asked Toei to provide more information as to what and why Matt’s videos were infringing. Instead of complying, Toei utilized YouTube’s automated tools to simply claim and block those 150 videos.

The following week, a game of phone tag ensued between Toei, the Japanese YouTube team, the American YouTube team, Fitzpatrick’s YouTube contact, and himself to reach “some sort of understanding” regarding his copyright situation. Toei ended up providing a new list of 86 videos of the original 150 or so that the company deemed should not remain on YouTube, a move Fitzpatrick described as “baffling” and “inconsistent.” Toei, he concludes, has no idea of the meaning of fair use or the rules the company wants creators to abide by.

“Contained in this list was frankly the most arbitrary assortment of videos that I had ever seen,” he said. “It honestly appeared as if someone chose videos at random as if chucking darts at a dart board.”

While Matt regained control of his videos thanks to his work alongside the YouTube rep, he was still in danger of Toei filing a lawsuit in Japan that he would almost certainly lose, given that country’s laws. Fortunately, YouTube has a method for blocking videos based on copyright claims in certain countries for these types of disputes. The Kotaku post linked above suggests that this method is brand new for YouTube, but it isn’t. It’s been around for a while but, somewhat amazingly, it appears to have never been used specifically when it comes to copyright laws in specific countries.

YouTube’s new copyright rule allows owners like Toei to have videos removed from, say, Japan’s YouTube site, but said videos will remain up in other territories as long as they fall under the country’s fair use policies. To have videos removed from places with more allowances for fair use, companies would have to argue their cases following the copyright laws of those territories.

And so Matt’s review videos remain up everywhere except in Japan. That isn’t a perfect solution by any stretch, but it seems to be as happy a middle ground as we’re likely to find given the circumstances. Those circumstances chiefly being that Toei Animation for some reason wants to go to war with a somewhat popular YouTuber who, whatever else you might want to say about his content, is certainly driving interest publicly in Toei’s products, for good or bad. This is a YouTuber the company could have collaborated with in one form or another, but instead it is busy burning down bridges.

“Similarly to how video games have embraced the online sphere, I sincerely believe that a collaborative or symbiotic relationship between online creators and copyright owners is not only more than possible but would likely work extremely well for both sides if they are open to it,” Fitzpatrick said.

That Toei Animation is not open to it is the chief problem here.

Filed Under: contentid, copyright, fair dealing, geoblocking, ireland, japan, matt fitzpatrick, reviews, takedowns, videos
Companies: toei animation, youtube

Japanese Police Arrest Man For Selling Modded Save Files For Single-Player Nintendo Game

from the what-the-what? dept

We’ve already written a few times about how Japan’s onerous Unfair Competition Prevention Law has created what looks from here like a massive overreach on the criminalization of copyright laws. Past examples include Japanese journalism executives being arrested over a book that tells people how to back up their own DVDs, along with more high-profile cases in which arrests occurred over the selling of cheats or exploits in online multiplayer video games. While these too seem like an overreach of copyright law, or at least an over-criminalization of relatively minor business problems facing electronic media companies, they are nothing compared with the idea that a person could be arrested and face jail time for the crime of selling modded save-game files for single player game like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

A 27-year old man in Japan was arrested after he was caught attempting to sell modified Zelda: Breath of The Wild save files.

As reported by the Broadcasting System of Niigata (and spotted by Dextro) Ichimin Sho was arrested on July 8 after he posted about modified save files for the Nintendo Switch version of Breath of The Wild. He posted his services onto an unspecified auction site, describing it as “the strongest software.” He would provide modded save files that would give the player improved in-game abilities and also items that were difficult to obtain were made available as requested by the customer. In his original listing, he reportedly was charging folks 3,500 yen (around $31 USD) for his service.

Upon arrest, Sho admitted that he’s made something like $90k over 18 months selling modded saves and software. Whatever his other ventures, the fact remains that Sho was arrested for selling modded saves for this one Zelda game to the public. And this game is fully a single-player game. In other words, there is not aspect of this arrest that involved staving off cheating in online multiplayer games, which is one of the concerns that has typically led to these arrests in Japan within the gaming industry. This is more like people getting mods for their owned games, along with save game files being traded, something that has existed in gaming for as long as the industry has existed.

As Kotaku notes, this isn’t wholly new for Japan.

While this might seem wild, being arrested for selling save files, it’s not a new situation in Japan. Police in Japan have previously arrested folks for modifying video game software which violates the Unfair Competition Prevention Law in Japan. This same law was also used by Nintendo to sue a go-kart company in 2017. In 2015, another man in Japan was arrested after selling cheats in the popular online shooter Alliance of Valiant Arms.

Except, again, in most of those instances the police were arresting those selling mods and cheats for online multiplayer games. That’s, frankly, bad enough, but we’re now talking about the arrest of a person for selling save game files for a single-player game.

And the real question becomes: who is this arrest protecting? The selling of these files doesn’t take any considerable money out of Nintendo’s pocket. It doesn’t harm other players of the game in the way cheating in online games does. So why is this arrest even happening? And, if there’s no good answer to that question, why is such a poorly written law that allows for this arrest remaining in place?

Filed Under: copyright, criminal copyright, japan, mods, save files, zelda
Companies: nintendo