Forum - View topicNEWS: Kodansha Wins 160-Million-Yen Lawsuit Against 3 Pirate Site Admins
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kpossibles
 Posts: 145 Location: USA |
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If you're reading manga illegally, you can always support the original by buying the Japanese version ebook? At least try to buy 1 book out of every series you read |
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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Does anyone else think three years in jail and $1.5 million collectively seems a bit excessive for the crimes involved? Is there an appeals procedure in Japan?
Do you think these guys even have anything close to $1.5 million among them? |
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 9838 Location: Virginia |
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@yuna49
I don't thing the punishment excessive. This is like a lot of white collar crime, since there is no bleeding corpse or maimed survivor to show it seems as though the crime is "not so bad". However, such crimes have the potential to hurt society as a whole much more severely than a crime against an individual. Left unchecked, pirate sites could cripple the entire industry, putting thousands out of work. As to the amount of the award, I've noticed that in this country that fines etc. seldom have any relationship to ability to pay. I'm not sure why Japan should be different. It is possible that the amount represents how badly the court thought Kodansha was actually hurt, or may simply be set as enough to take everything the defendants may possible have squirreled away. They apparently were very successful in distributing pirated manga. How successful they were in monetizing that, and how much stuck to them is an open question. |
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AkumaChef
Posts: 821 |
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I don't know enough about the details of the case to really say. If these guys were just sharing pirated manga I think it's pretty stiff. OTOH, if they were profiting off of what is clearly an illegal activity that's a different story. From what I gather reading the article these guys had been running a pirate site for years. That seems to fall into the latter category rather than the former. It sounds like these guys were making a business out of it. That's a full-blown criminal enterprise, not some victimless crime. |
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 9838 Location: Virginia |
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@AkumaChef
I think the scale of the operation is more important than the presence or absence of profit when assigning a penalty. The harm they do to the industry is the same regardless of the amount of money they make. This tends to be obscured by the fact that all of the really big operations tend to be money making criminal organizations. Good intentions don't make a crime less severe. |
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Puniyo
 Posts: 271 |
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The music industry has a thing where they equate x amount of streams = 1 sale depending on the revenue, so I'd assume this method is used elsewhere too? It's not relevant because, in the west at least, it used to be incredibly difficult to obtain anime legally. Fansubs and transliterations of unlicensed media is doing the opposite of hurting the industry (as long as it is removed as soon as a license is obtained), sure. You could even extend the argument to when you had to buy a VHS or DVD to watch an anime, because that's a big investment, and most people won't buy something they didn't already like. In the age of streaming sites though, where you can stream legally for free? There's simply no excuse. Pirate sites are more of a hassle to use than legal ones, even. Of course, this is even less relevant in Japan, where no such language and license barrier exists to obtaining anime legally. You're going to see ads on the pirate site anyway, so why would you give the money to them instead of the creators? Shouldn't anime fans be the last people to play into the whole devaluing of artistic professions? |
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AkumaChef
Posts: 821 |
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I agree completely. I suppose I didn't make my point very clear. I was trying to say that we know this must have been a large-scale operation given that it went on for such a long time, and the people involved were administering a site for the specific purpose of piracy (as opposed to the smaller-scale operation of posting links on someone else's site). My mention of profit wasn't the main point, rather the existence of profit is an indicator as to the size of the operation.
I'm not sure what you mean here. If you meant that good intentions don't make the impact of a crime less severe, then I agree with you completely. If you're talking about how the legal system handles punishment for crimes then I disagree, and intent is extremely important: for example, we treat accidental crimes very differently than we treat premeditated ones. We treat "crimes of passion" or "in the heat of the moment" very differently than we do carefully planned crimes. |
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 9838 Location: Virginia |
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@AkumaChef
I realize there are different penalties for accidental vs. intended crimes. I was talking about people who knowingly break the law from the best intentions. This is especially important as we are discussing piracy of IP. While there are a lot of provisions of current law that should be changed, our current system is better than none at all. Piracy used to be difficult. Photocopy a story or copy a TV show to VHS tape and share it with your friends and you haven't really caused an damage. Copy the same story or show to the internet and you have made it available to half the world. Concerning crimes of passion, the courts are slowly changing to recognize that this is often simply an excuse for domestic violence. We no longer have an unwritten law that you can kill your spouse if you catch them in the act. |
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AkumaChef
Posts: 821 |
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I didn't intend for my comment to be limited to domestic violence or literal passion in the romantic sense. I simply meant that the legal system considers intent to be extremely important generally speaking, thus it is difficult for me to frame your previous comment about "Good intentions don't make a crime less severe. " I don't know if you're speaking about the level impact of the crime on its victims or society (in which case I agree) or if you're speaking about the level of punishment that society generally chooses to impose on the criminal (in which case I disagree). |
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