News
FC2 President, Co-Founder Arrested On Obscenity Charges
posted on by Rafael Antonio Pineda
NHK News Web reported on Thursday that the Kyoto Prefectural Police's anti-cybercrime unit arrested 39-year old Makoto Adachi — president of the video-sharing company FC2 and the related company Home Page System — and 38-year old Tomon Takahashi — FC2's former president and co-founder — on charges of obscenity on Wednesday.
The Kyoto Prefectural Police also announced that the FC2 company itself is under investigation. The prefectural police conducted a search of the company's offices in Osaka on the same day of the arrests, and will also investigate the company's finances regarding its registration fees.
FC2 has already been under investigation since September last year, when the website allegedly allowed a man from Osaka and a female junior college student from Hyōgo prefecture to stream obscene acts live to an unspecified number of viewers. Thus, Adachi and the company allegedly allowed users to access obscene content with their knowledge.
Both Adachi and Takahashi denied the charges. Adachi commented, "It's a mistake."
According to The Kyoto Shimbun, the FC2 video-sharing website is the fourth most accessed video-sharing website in Japan as of March. The company is incorporated in the United States, and it has previously asserted that its headquarters and servers are also located in the United States, which has made it difficult in the past for Japanese companies and authorities to take legal action against the site.
Last year, police in multiple prefectures in Japan arrested at least three FC2 users for allegedly uploading copyrighted content without the copyright holder's permission. In 2013 seven Japanese production firms also sued FC2 for 65 million yen (about US$542,345 at today's exchange rate) in damages for allegedly hosting copyrighted content.
[Via Hachima Kikō]
