Rokuga Net
Aaron Gerow
aaron.gerow at yale.edu
Tue Oct 12 14:33:06 EDT 2004
It seems that people went off to KC4 in Montreal (thanks to everyone at
McGill for the good time) and forgot about the list! Keep those mails
coming--those at KC4, please send the list some reports.
Here's one bit of news from before KC4 that I didn't have time to
mention:
A Tokyo district court issued a temporary restraining order against a
company called Rokuga Net which has been offering a service to Japanese
living abroad that copies TV programs digitally and sends them abroad.
NHK and five of the commercial stations in Tokyo asked for a
restraining order until the case can be brought to court, arguing that
the service is a violation of copyright.
I actually had heard of Rokuga Net before, having investigated it after
moving to the States. Their rather clever way of getting around
copyright problems (they thought) was this: the company would sell
subscribers a computer with a TV tuner and place it in their Tokyo
office. The subscriber could then instruct their computer from abroad
to record programs of their choice and Rokuga Net, for a fee, would
help with the data transmission. Their argument was that since the
computer was the property of the subscriber, it was equivalent to a
personal VCR recorder and the service itself was no different from
paying someone to record something on your own VCR in Japan and send it
to your home abroad. The law, they argued, allows this kind of personal
use of copied material.
Since this was a temporary order, the court may not have giving any
reasoning for its decision, but the case itself does have large
implications regarding not only the digitial recording and distribution
of moving images, but also one's personal rights to record or copy
material. Let's wait and see what the final decision is.
Aaron Gerow
KineJapan owner
Assistant Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University
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