The Japanese national Diet enacted revisions to the Copyright Act (chosakuken-hoh) in June 5, 2020 (issue: June 12, 2020). The actual changes have begun to go into effect on the 1st of the present October, and further changes to enforcement…
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The Japan Patent Office published its annual Status Report in April. Here are a few of the things we noted. Patent Prosecution in Japan -Steady decline in domestic and international patent filings (under 345,000 in 2010 and nearly 308,000 in…
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Japan does not have a “fair use” doctrine such as is employed by the United States regarding using copyrighted materials for nonprofit, educational purposes. However, its Copyright Act has been revised and its new provisions are going into effect in…
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Back in 2017, a number of music schools in Japan banded together to file a case against the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) for demanding that they pay royalties for songs music teachers demonstrated to…
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Those accused of conspiracy in the Mangamura digital pirated manga website are being brought to justice (at least for many, it seems so) under the Copyright Act of Japan (see a recent related article here), one by one. Adachi Wataru,…
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Japan’s prolific manga comic industry has been charged with being sluggish to provide youth with digital manga materials, and some of those who entered the black market of pirated manga in response to the demand are now facing criminal charges….
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JASRAC (Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers), the music licensing corporation that manages copyright for a vast swath of music in Japan, continues its fight against unlicensed use of music it controls. On May 13, 2019, it…
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Japan, seeking to keep with the challenges that digital reproduction makes for copyright infringement prevention, has been aiming to bring the law more to bear on downloaders of pirated materials online. This comes in the wake of the Mangamura manga…
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On January 17, 2019, the Japanese Patent Attorney’s Association held a press conference in which presenter Seiji Matsuda pointed out the impact of the now-effective modified Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement (often called TPP-11) on intellectual property. The major changes…
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Mangamura, the large online manga comic sharing website that was closed earlier this year for piracy of copyrighted manga, is now facing deeper scrutiny. Vast records from its online server company (an American company, Cloudflare) have been served up to…
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