YouTube and JASRAC

[amnornes@umich.edu]

Mark Schilling has been reporting in Variety about how The Japan 
Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers has been giving 
YouTube a hard time. There's the complaint I noted a while back, which 
resulted in the pulling of 30,000 videos. Seems that didn't stop the 
pirates. Surprise suprise. So they sent this nasty letter. I guess 
YouTube agreed to put a notice in Japanese on their page. Guess what? 
JASRAC wasn't satisfied. It's curious how excited they are. Or is this 
simply something to help justify the existence of the various tanto.

Complaint letter follows.

Markus




December 4, 2006

Mr. Chad Hurley, CEO
Mr. Steve Chen, CTO
YouTube, Inc.
1000 Cherry Avenue
Second Floor
San Bruno, CA 94066
USA


Dear Sirs:

We are right holders in Japanese audio-visual works and are 
associations of right holders as such. A large amount of audio-visual 
works are uploaded without right holders? permission on your 
YouTube.com website, resulting in copyright infringement. To deal with 
this situation, we have been taking the ?Notice and Takedown? 
procedures based on the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which 
imposes much time and effort on us. However, as a large number of 
audio-visual works are illegally uploaded despite our notices, we are 
seriously concerned about the current situation where the Notice and 
Takedown scheme, aimed to prevent copyright infringements, is not 
functioning well due to the large volume of illegal uploads.

Taking into account the current status of your service, we believe that 
your company should not just wait for right owners to take the ?Notice 
and Takedown? procedures but should bear the responsibility to prevent, 
in advance, copyright infringements such as illegal uploads and 
distributions, or to avoid those infringements. We hereby request you 
to implement an infringement-preventive system, which eliminates 
copyright infringement by employing various technologies of today and 
the efforts of the website operator, and which identifies and indicates 
uploaded works from legitimate right holders.

While we expect you to promptly take adequate and necessary measures to 
prevent copyright infringement on the YouTube website, until you do so, 
we request you to take provisional measures, including but not limited 
to those listed below, in order to prevent illegal uploads of 
audio-visual works, which copyrights are neither owned by the persons 
posting the works on the website themselves nor licensed by right 
owners:

1. 	Indicate on the top page of the YouTube website, in Japanese, that 
?Posting or uploading audio-visual works, which copyrights are neither 
owned by yourselves nor licensed by right owners, is illegal, and such 
act may impose you civil and/or criminal liability.?
*If necessary, we will provide the Japanese text.
2. 	Register the names and addresses of those users making uploads and 
to keep such records.
3. 	Terminate the user accounts of those who illegally uploaded 
audio-visual works deleted on and after June 2006 upon our requests and 
to not allow them to make further uploads.

We kindly request you respond to this letter no later than December 15, 2006.

Please send your reply to : Network Section, Transmission Rights 
Department, JASRAC, 3-6-12 Uehara, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, 151-8540 Japan.
We appreciate your cooperation in this matter.


Sincerely yours,

Junichi Shinsaka
Secretary General
Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan, Inc.

Nobuyoshi Sakai
Deputy General Manager
General Administration
Japan Video Software Association

Shiro Aono
Chairman
Copyright Committee
The Association of Japanese Animations (AJA)

Takeshi Inagaki
Secretary General
Association of All Japan TV Program Production Companies (ATP)

Ryohei Ishii
Director
Copyright & Contracts Division
Rights & Archives Center
Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK)

Jun Takeuchi
Director
Digital, Broadcast Promotion Division
The National Association of Commercial Broadcasters in Japan

Hikaru Sasao
General Manager
Rights & Contracts Management
Compliance & Standards Division
Nippon Television Network Corporation

Ryuichi Fukao
Director
Legal & Business Affairs
Broadcast Content & Rights Management Center
Headquarters Programming and Production
Tokyo Broadcasting System, Inc

Shinya Chiba
Senior Director
Copyrights Intellectual Properties Center
Fuji Television Network, Inc.

Hideo Takahashi
Contract & Copyright Department
(Deputy General Manager, Programming & Entertainment Division)
TV Asahi Corporation

Tomoyuki Ikeda
Manager
Copyright Department
Programming Division
TV Tokyo Corporation

Yasuyoshi Yamashita
Manager
Righs Business Department
Television Kanagawa, Inc.

Yoshio Yamamoto
Bureau Chief
Special Events & Digital Media Bureau
Asahi Broadcasting Corporation

Kenichi Kameda
General Manager
Broadcast Standards, Rights & Contracts
Yomiuri Telecasting Corporation

Tadashi Nagae
General Manager
Copyright Management Department
Tokai Television Broadcasting Co.Ltd.

Masashi Kondo
Copyright Division Director
Japan Satellite Broadcasting Association

Masashi Kondo
General Manager
Multiwindow Contents & Copyrights Department
Space Shower Networks inc.

Yoshinori Itou
Section Chief
Broadcast Planning and programming Division
Department of Broadcasting
The University of the Air Foundation

Fuminori Nakagawa
Acting Manager
Strategy Legal Affairs Dept.
Association of Copyright for Computer Software(ACCS)

Hideki Matsutake
Director
Executive Committee
Center for Performances? Rights Administration(CPRA)

Kenji Takasugi
Secretary General
Director & General Manager
Legal Department
Recording Industry Association of Japan(RIAJ)

Naoya Bessho
Chief Compliance Officer & VP
Legal Department
Yahoo! JAPAN Corporation

Satoshi Watanabe
Manager
Transmission Rights Department
Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers(JASRAC)