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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