Question on Fair Use of Film Stills

[Mark Roberts]

To belatedly follow up on this, I managed to convince the publisher that there are no rights issues concerning DVD frame grabs. I would like to thank all of you on KineJapan for your supportive and very helpful responses about this, both on and off-list. 

On the chance that anybody else confronts this in the future, here is a summary of what I learned. This is based upon discussion with Aaron, Markus, and informal consultation with three different Japanese IP lawyers, all of whom were in agreement.

First, there is a difference between using publicity photographs, which do require permission from the production company, and DVD stills, which do not.

The use of DVD stills is covered under article 32.1 of the Japanese copyright law (著作権法第32条), according to which academics are entitled to reproduce quotations for research purposes. Two conditions must be met: (1) the quotation must be a smaller unit than the entire text, where "smaller" means a fragment, and does not concern the size of the image; and (2) the purpose of including the quotation should serve some kind of argument or analysis. I.e., it's not just there to "look good". (Thanks to Kim Icreverzi for clarifying these details.)

This was recently tested in court, in the case of Uesugi Satoshi vs. Kobayashi Yoshinori:

平成11(ネ)4783 平成12年04月25日 東京高等裁判所
http://hanrei.biz/h50421

This case concerned a book that quoted Kobayashi's manga "Sensō-ron", with the court deciding that scholars can reproduce panels from a manga without permission, for the purposes of academic discussion and analysis. The case was appealed and the decision of a lower court was upheld by Tokyo Kosai.

I suspect that I may not be the last person to encounter resistance from a publisher, and hopefully some of this information might prove useful.

Best regards,

Mark Roberts
Research Fellow, University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy
http://utcp.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/blog/mark_roberts/index_en.php

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