Police in Japan arrest man for uploading movie summaries to YouTube | Hacker News Reader

Police in Japan arrest man for uploading movie summaries to YouTube

torrentfreak.com

32 pointsgeox7 comments

Huh. The headline makes it sound like this guy did nothing wrong and his arrest should be cause for a free speech protest. But TFA reveals that that this guy would just pirate a movie and then make a super cut of it that pretty much just contained the core plot. Despite the claim that part of the problem is that Japan has no fair use provisions, I don't think fair use really covers this.

Hmm, sounds like something a lot of people do--add some commentary, make some cuts, but effectively reveal the whole movie. If your review of a 99-minute film is over 30 minutes long, is mostly clips from the movie, and reveals the major plot points [1] it's probably not fair use, regardless of how many times your fans proclaim that it is.

My issue is that this should probably be a civil matter.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfdJTu7Ns2s

Does Japan not have a fair use clause in their copyright law? This seems like a really clear cut case of fair use. But this is japan, they arrested a schoolgirl for a JS prank [1].

[1]:https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/03/09/1940202/japanese-pol...

No, they don't.

Must be nice to live in a place where your police are so bored, having such low crime rates in a homogeneous, high-trust society, that they have to do petty stuff like this to earn their paycheck.

That is because they are not doing their job:

"If the Yakuza are criminals, why don't the Japanese police simply arrest them?"

https://www.quora.com/If-the-Yakuza-are-criminals-why-dont-t...

Yakuza are criminals sure, but it's similar to mafia. They are not murdering randoms, harming the public, they are not giving drugs to children(mostly), there are codes among these kinds of criminal groups that are probably more dignified than government laws. They are entrepreneurs and they realized they make more money with legit businesses than by getting kids on meth. They are just normal men who don't want to pay taxes, essentially.

See; While many Yakuza syndicates, notably the Yamaguchi-gumi, officially forbid their members from engaging in drug trafficking, some other Yakuza syndicates, notably the Dojin-kai, are heavily involved in it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com