[KineJapan] Copyright-free images

[Gerow Aaron]

Roberta,

I have not heard anyone talk about 1978 as a cutoff year for Japan. The current copyright law went into effect in 1971, so in some cases, the question of whether a work was produced before that has been an issue (the Kurosawa court case), but in general, stills are treated like other photographs: they are in copyright for 50 years after the death of the author. They changed the period in 1997, so 1957 is now the crucial year for photos (before that, it was 50 years after release, and since the 1997 revision did not revive works that had become public domain, most things before 1957 are thus public domain). See here for the Bunkacho summary:

http://chosakuken.bunka.go.jp/naruhodo/outline/4.4.html

Note that Wikipedia treats 1957 as the cutoff year for images from Japan.

The problem with stills is that there often is no author. I believe in those cases of corporate authors, it is 50 years after release. 

Frame grabs from DVDs are another matter. Stills are individual works, but screenshots are not. I and others have argued that recent court cases in Japan--such as the one that validated the quotation of manga images in academic works without permission--the definition of quotation (which is allowed by law) includes frame grabs. I don't think that has come to court in Japan. Many foreign publishers treat frame grabs as quotations, and thus allow them, but not all do. 

This is not the most authoritative of answers, but I hope it helps.


Aaron Gerow
Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Director of Graduate Studies, EALL
Yale University
320 York Street, Room 311
PO Box 208236
New Haven, CT 06520-8236
USA
Phone: 1-203-432-7082
Fax: 1-203-432-6729
e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu
website: www.aarongerow.com









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