There is also a high level of Internet service provider cooperation. Unlike most other countries, filesharing copyrighted content is not just a civil offense, but a criminal one, with penalties of up to ten years for uploading and penalties of up to two years for downloading. The law focuses mainly on content downloaded to devices, so a loophole may exist in terms of livestreaming such content. Penalties for operating or establishing leech sites will be set at up to five years in jail or a maximum fine of 5 million yen.

The new legislation exempts 'minor offenses' and 'special instances' (such as unintentional instances in screenshots, parodies and derivative works, and other small instances, such as downloading only a few frames from a comic book of several dozen pages, or a couple of pages from a novel containing several hundred pages) from being categorized as illicit due to concerns it would clash with the right to freedom of speech. The part on the expansion of penalties took effect on 1 January 2021, and the part on regulation of leech websites and apps took effect on 1 October 2021. In 2020, the National Diet passed a law expanding the penalties to the download of manga, academic texts, and magazines, as well as banning 'leech websites' that provide users hyperlinks to download torrent files of pirated materials, pasting hyperlinks of illegal websites on an anonymous message board, or providing 'leech apps' for similar purposes. In 2012, a law was passed that would invoke penalties for accessing pirated music or movies. The Recording Industry Association of Japan has used a 2010 study to suggest that illegal downloads (which have been illegal since 2010) outnumber legal ones 10:1. Comparison of Internet Relay Chat clientsįile sharing in Japan is notable for both its size and sophistication.

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