Japanese police make first YouTuber arrest for uploading video game gameplay
japantoday.com
japantoday.com
Japan’s “justice” system is based on something outlawed in England nigh on 800 years ago under Magna Carta (remedied as habeus corpus). It’s basically legalised kidnapping by the police where they hold you hostage to yourself until you admit the charges against you. You may be held indefinitely, if the court so wishes.
Thus, his confession should be seen with scepticism as to its truth.
I'd also take objection with the "surpass us" term. Japan was not "ahead" in technological terms until the late postwar period. Before WW2 they were almost on par, and largely because they made massive efforts to pilfer technology and methodologies from Western Europe. It was after WW2, when they were forbidden from military expansion, that they focused on economic development (again with massive "imports" of know-how), so much that they briefly "surpassed" the by-then-dominant US in certain fields.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/16/japan-approves...
You can't steal ideas. If they took technology, duplicated it and made it better then that's a good thing.
>so much that they briefly "surpassed" //
They copied, but they got a better grade?
This sounds like a good thing, something all technology companies working in the same area should strive for, and indeed how patents (in a limited way) and open-source work : one creates improvement over the current developments.
Why would you want people spending time 'reinventing the wheel' just because they live in another country. Use the best of tech and make it better if you can.
It's not that it's too far compared to the other stuff, but they also have a hard time catching higher ups with this other stuff, since they don't do it themselves.
So it's actually a very common way to catch them. One from the Yamaguchi clan was caught recently for having subscribed for a point card in a supermarket.
If it's the system, then should we not expect Japanese living abroad to engage in more crime? Are Japanese-Americans more likely to engage in crime than their ancestors?
Take castes for example Japan has castes or "Burakumin" even now in 2023. Anyone who deals with "unclean" job like slaughterhouse, undertaker, obviously Japanese mob (which ironically was created due to the discrimination). Supposedly (and highly likely) the people who were tasked with cleaning up in the radioactive areas of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster were all or labelled Burakumin people.
Then there is Japanese blood personality types which is yet another form of discrimination, lord help you if you're type B.
The indigenous residents of Japan Ainu are also discriminated against.
The author is a criminal lawyer (https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/朔立木), so I'm assuming it's stark accurate.
As someone who has had cases thrown out before trial, and known other people who have been found "not guilty", the conviction rate for non-federal in the US is (very) much lower.
“The conviction rate is 99.3%. By only stating this high conviction rate it is often misunderstood as too high—however, this high conviction rate drops significantly when accounting for the fact that Japanese prosecutors drop roughly half the cases they are given. If measured in the same way, the United States' federal conviction rate would be 99.8%.”
Mitnick did not request a speedy trial, in fact he moved to delay the trial.
https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/20-years-later-guanta...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law
As I understand it the basis legally is about Guantanamo bay not being formally part of the US, and therefore not subject to the constitution or regular law. Military law probably applies, although I'm not 100% on this.
Then the next logical step is to declare Detroit outside of US legal jurisdiction. This will solve a lot problems. /s
And that’s the problem. The government “deciding” that Guantanamo is a special jurisdiction to do whatever they want.
Not sure why your innocent framing justifies it?
You don't get to just scoop people up and hold them indefinitely on the basis of 'whoopsiedoodle, nobody will take them back.'
These people are unofficial POW of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars from what I understand. They should be returned to the governments of both.
Unofficial POW isn’t a status; that’s just a detainee.
The Supreme Court has essentially ruled there is no particular deadline (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barker_v._Wingo). Individual states do have rules, but it varies based on the type of crime, and tend not to match a normal person's definition of speedy.
Just look at any article that comes up on this site that covers the justice system. It's a hot mess everywhere, to a varying degree.
Japan is no exception, and there are countless number of injustices. But at the very least, the police there don't get to shoot people and walk scott free.
Detaining suspects for long periods of time and forcing confessions is a topic that comes up repeatedly, each time with different examples. I don't know how anyone can say with a straight face that this isn't anything of substance.
The prosecution repeatedly (1) refused to provide their evidence in discovery - Mitnick wanted proof to prepare his defence. My reading is that the government was hoping he would just fold, instead of fighting back.
(1) https://www.zdnet.com/article/more-delays-for-mitnick-trial/
> Suspects can be detained for an "interview" in a daiyō kangoku for as many as seventy-two hours under the Code of Criminal Procedure. After this seventy-two-hour period, prosecutors can request a further ten days' detention of the suspect from a judge. These ten days are frequently used by the investigative authorities to gain confessions from the suspect. After the initial ten-day extension, the prosecutor can request a further ten days of detention from a judge, before the suspect must either be charged or released. Activists claim that requests for pre-trial detention after arrest are almost always granted by judges; in 1987, the rate of approval for all requests was 99.8%
I don't think Western courts approve pre-trial detention at this rate, though I wouldn't be surprised if 99.8% of search warrants are granted, for example.
He was freed from that after serving his sentence. He since been held awaiting extradition after being charged in the US with a ton of crimes
Since then various of appeals have been progressing to extradite him or not, and quite rightly as someone convicted of fleeing bail He not eligible for bail.
I’m no fan of the one sided extradition treaty the U.K. and US has, however the US has raised plenty of charges including conspiracy to hack, actually hacking, and the espionage one.
Germany charges him with murder applies for extradition
You think Canada should just say “nah”?
silly beliefs about copyrights for certain media was one of major reasons why Kpop crushed Jpop. Kpop companies lets people edit & share all clips freely, Japan only recently start allowing people outside Japan to be able to view their content on youtube.
Also I assume that you're aware of this: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/sumo/
* Railway Journey
* Cycle Japan
* Somewhere Street
* Lunch Expo
* Bento Express
* pythagoras switch (theres a new one thats like programing focused)
* I really miss Supreme Skills thoBeing practiced by almost exclusively Japanese probably doesn't help either; you can't root for your "home team", so to speak. No one watched darts in the Netherlands, then a Dutch candidate won the world title 25 years ago and everyone in the Netherlands was watching it.
That depends what you mean by "Japanese". Naturalized Japanese, probably, but a fair number of the wrestlers are originally from Mongolia or Eastern Europe now.
Though I don't follow it myself so don't know how interesting it is. Always wanted to try the food though.
found this recently for those interested! worth it for ads alone.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/12zdtv1/3_years_ago...
And the sponsored time bought from variety steamers pretty much proves the effectiveness. It wouldn't continue happening if it wasn't worth it for the distributors. Since the links published during the stream are attributable to the source, they get a good signal that it pays off.
(+ Personal anecdote: I bought some games just because I saw them on Twitch)
I don’t know other way to learn about new games if not by a streamer or promoted on steam home page, steam has an awful algorithm, so you wouldn’t be recommended a lot of new games, just the same games most of the time.
For example, if you are borderline about investing in DCS (combat flightsim) and related gear, watching someone like Growling Sidewinder can tip you over. It hasn't convinced me yet because I don't wish to buy the required rig, but it might.
And I bought Il-2 after watching another channel's gameplay videos.
There's a significant difference from showing gameplay of most games, vs visual novels that have basically no real game elements.
I don't claim to know the right answer, just that the statement you're making doesn't highlight the argument being made, which HAS merit worthy of some thought
We can argue that copyright shouldn't exist but it seems pretty non-controversial that this is a violation of copyright.
I have no idea if this person was doing anything illegitimate, just pointing out its not the same.
Would be nice to just get the videos pulled instead of outright arresting people. Maybe someone is wanting to make a point.
https://www.inverse.com/input/culture/report-japan-criminali...
The way things are, my tax dollars are being used to protect profits of companies that often themselves pay no tax.
That said, the 99% conviction rate is a bit misleading in that the prosecution rate is pretty low (as low as 10%?). Seems as the prosecutors are picking and choosing slam dunk cases than sending cases through the courts to avoid not guilty verdicts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_system_of_Jap...
That's about the same as US federal prosecutors, but it mainly means they don't even bother prosecuting unless they think it's a sure thing.
That said, a visual novel has little to no gameplay. "Watching it" is all there is to it (minor minigames may be present in some games in this genre, but barely and often not at all). So streaming a full video of its gameplay is as close as it gets to giving the game for free. This is almost like streaming a full episode of an animé to which you don't have the rights.
Again, I don't agree with arresting anyone for this, just providing context.
Typically a full playthrough will try to get all endings, but won't get all of the subchoices that just affect flavour. https://vndb.org/v11/lengthvotes
Some have minor decisions to make, some none at all.
I'm not a fan of the genre, but that's neither here nor there.
Japan calls them a variety of different things. Sometimes they're called "adventure games", like Monkey Island or Phoenix Wright, or "kinetic novel" or "sound novel". They don't actually use the term "visual novel" though. (complicating this a bit, it's common in Japanese game marketing to make up a new genre for every game series instead of just saying it's "an FPS" or whatever.)
> [...] it causes people to say things like "they're not a fan of the genre", which is a weird thing to say about the concept of books.
I'm not a fan of the genre because it tends to be terrible. Way more uncomfortable than reading a book (staring at a computer screen), the requirement to press "next" or choose between trivial dialogue choices is tiring, and the writing is uniformly terrible.
So in principle I wouldn't have anything against the genre, except in practice it's terrible.
There is a genre of videogames that is way better than visual novels and requires lots of reading, but also has real and often innovative gameplay: interactive fiction (the evolution of text adventures of old, Infocom et al).
Some of them like When they Cry or Planetarian have full-screen text - those are the ones Japan actually calls "novel games". Those are usually more worth reading.
Whoa, that's harsh. I suspect that has to do more with translation quality than the writing quality. Getting translation right is difficult, if not impossible. But people tend to underestimate that. Additionally, dialogue choices in visual novels are far from trivial. They often represent major turning points in the story.
Though visual novels aren't quite mainstream even in Japan, they were quite popular. If the writing was uniformly terrible, it wouldn't have sold as much.
It's ok that other people like them though, I'm not the Good Taste Police.
> Though visual novels aren't quite mainstream even in Japan, they were quite popular. If the writing was uniformly terrible, it wouldn't have sold as much.
I'm sure you can find the flaw in "lots of people like this therefore it cannot be uniformly terrible". There are plenty of examples of this phenomenon.
In Spanish we have a saying: "eat poop, millions of flies cannot be wrong!".
> I'm not a fan of the genre, but that's neither here nor there
...and some are highly branchy, the Western equivalent being CYOA.
Kagetsu Tohya: http://www.nowere.net/a/src/1347481654955.jpg
Clannad: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Morlok8k/Clannad_VN_Flowch...
Those are all DAGs, but I suspect there are some with actual loops too.
Well, the problem in this case is that the answer isn't "lots of them" but "very few of them". And those that have options, based on reviews I've seen, are mostly cosmetic, the story is "on rails".
Being "on rails" defines the genre, I'd say. That, and terrible writing.
I think perhaps you shouldn't speak with such authority on the medium. Many have terrible writing, many have excellent writing. It depends on the author(s) and also to an extent on the localization team if it's being read in English or another language.
What "authority"? I'm giving my opinion; this started with the comment "I'm not a fan of the genre". I don't claim to be an authority.
All of the visual novels I've played were terrible and their plots would have been rightfully mocked had they been books. They also had little to no branching and lacked any meaningful decisions. Note I played many that were highly regarded in websites such as Home of the Underdogs, whose owner was a fan of the genre.
That's just my experience (based on playing games since the Commodore 64). I base my opinions on my experience. I don't push them on you. It entitles me to say I'm no fan of the genre -- no more, no less.
I wonder why I seem to have struck such a nerve for multiple users here on HN just because I said I wasn't a fan of a genre. I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition!
From the article, though: >In a statement following his arrest, CODA, Japan’s Content Overseas Distribution Promotion Organization, asserted that, “in principle,” any use of gameplay videos requires permission from the rights holder.
Granted the article linked doesn't explain anything: The Japanese government, specifically the courts and law enforcement, are simply exercising demands made by Kadokawa concerning copyright infringement.
So yes, it's piracy, but it also isn't a perfect reproduction.
One might think that the fact that choices are flattened into a purely linear story would ruin the experience, but most choices are so vestigial that removing them is an improvement in my book.
I liked the first anime series, but (for me) the visual novel was incredibly tedious and boring. Did a refund of it on Steam about after 10-15 mins (from rough memory).
Theres no way I'd be able to put up with it for the whole duration.
Maybe I'll get around to trying one of the others you mentioned in a different comment. :)
And then there are masterpiece VNs absolutely chock full of choices and an extremely complex story graph, like Subarashiki Hibi or Fate Stay/Night.
(And, in my opinion, it's one of the worst things ever written.)
There are many equally valid "true" endings, not counting all the side endings. Sounds like it wasn't your cup of tea, that's fine. No VN is universally loved.
Also bonus link to one of my favorite tracks in the game: https://youtu.be/dQ5g1Va7CjI
Most VNs are structured as routes. The reader does not choose how the story will unfold, but rather chooses one of several linear stories to follow. I would classify that as a fundamentally linear story. The fact that the route is chosen by a choice in the middle is not really different from choosing the route from a menu at the start. In fact, most people use guides to get on the desired route.
SubaHibi is even more linear than that, because the playing order of the routes is enforced. Each route is unlocked only after the previous one is completed. There is one "True" ending, which is required to be completed last. The mysteries are only fully resolved by reaching the True ending.
(I don't think the True ending actually adds anything. In fact, all the mysteries were resolved to my satisfaction less than halfway through the story. But that's a matter of opinion once again.)
Anyway we aren't going to agree here. I am interested in two things: what VNs you do like... and what VNs you would consider non-linear. The discussion can't really continue without a point of comparison.
https://www.cnet.com/culture/entertainment/three-arrested-in...
I would say stripping artists of their rights is the opposite of progress
Though artists are often very leftist and/or liberal they tend to be extremely conservative about intellectual property rights because their livelihood depends on it. This is fair enough, but unfortunately even outside of AI, intellectual property law is already overzealous. We probably need alternate funding models or something.
Mozilla has been creating an open dataset for text-to-speech/speech-to-text for years now with thousands of contributors, why can't Google do the same?
These statements always ignore that libre AI models exist, and rely on the weakening of copyright laws to let small creators use AI and compete against corporations that will use AI regardless, because once again, they have the resources to license giant datasets and we don’t.
I don't know about that. One of the biggest problems IMO with most theft is that is is net value negative. Someone steals my $500 cell phone and fences it for $100. The fence resells it for $250 to some poor sap who can't use it because it is IMSI banned. Value is destroyed.
This is why many consider it okay for a starving man to steal bread to eat. His value (not starving) is greater than the cost to the baker (1 loaf of bread).
There's no logical persuasion or voting blue our way into taking the edge of copyright from those with the most gained from it. This is a tougher fight than that...
the property i'm talking about is more specifically 'means of production' type property, not someone's left shoe
No, property rights exist because of a social value judgement that their existence is a net benefit. The particular structure of some aspects enforcing property rights in one class of property (tangible personal property) reflect that. (Mostly, in the Anglo-American system, this is addressed by the theft and conversion crimes and torts.) But the other main class of tangible property (real property) doesn’t really have the same nature, nor do most other elements of the broad class of intangible personal property, and the primary means of enforcing them against encroachment tend to be oriented around trespass (in common law terms, though there are special terms for it for some specific subtypes of property, such as as “infringement” for most IP rights) rather than theft/conversion, which also applies to tangible personal property (trespass to chattels).
You can't meaningfully enforce intellectual property rights in the general case. If someone learns the secret KFC recipe, you can't take it away from them.
Also, Steins;Gate, which does not contain sexual content, was briefly banned on Steam because Valve is run by the kind of people who think everything from Japan is child porn. (And then the only product they've ever unbanned from people complaining about this.) This is /after/ they changed policies to supposedly allow absolutely anything on the store, which is why it's full of trashy 3D rendered porn now; turns out "anything" means "anything Western".
> "Steins;Gate" is a visual novel, and as the name implies, the gameplay consists primarily of reading, with few prompts or inputs required by the player. With the intended appeal being much more watching the narrative unfold than directly controlling the onscreen action, visual novels are, comparatively, closer than other games to a book or movie
In contrast, even a campaign in AOE2 requires a lot of actions to go anywhere.
> In a statement following his arrest, CODA, Japan’s Content Overseas Distribution Promotion Organization, asserted that, “in principle,” any use of gameplay videos requires permission from the rights holder.
The legal situation might be different in other countries.
But the US also has fair use and Japan doesn't, so it'd be easier to fight. Instead, Japanese publishers who do want to encourage streaming put up rules promising not to take you down as long as you don't show X content, or especially lenient IPs like Touhou will have copyright grants for fanart, and you can't do anything outside of that in public.
The series where they're open about it commercially like Touhou/Vocaloid have explicit rules for what's ok and what isn't though.
Anyways based on the available details, I'm surprised the police were even involved in what should really be a civil case between the rights holder and the YouTuber. I don't know if the Japanese public is safer or better off after this arrest.
> Fall in love with the lab members all over again in this sweet and slapstick romantic comedy!
Plus the impression that I got from their promotional video on Steam, I wanted to ask... Is this a porn or a semi-porn game? Because if so, then it makes sense for the creator/publisher to restrict the exposure of their game based on both the legal grounds and commercial interests.
https://www.classification.gov.au/titles/steinsgate-my-darli...
For comparison, the Fate series did start with pornography and is easily one of the most popular franchises in and outside of Japan. I'm sure you've heard of Fate/Grand Order which is one of the most profitable mobile games out there.
For reference, a lot of popular anime series and manga started as pornography. Manga, anime, light/web novels, visual novels and games have a symbiotic relationship in Japan, so they get adapted from one to the others quite frequently.
As to why they do this, well, it's Japan. The average age is 48, and the average CEO is 60+. They don't really have the concept of fair use like in the US. IF you want a perfect example of how detached they are from the internet, you can just look at Nintendo who to this day still goes hard after Youtubers who just cover their games. They're extremely protective of their IPs, especially when it comes to foreigners or people in Japan whom they have no professional relationship with.
> They're extremely protective of their IPs, especially when it comes to foreigners or people in Japan whom they have no professional relationship with.
If that's the case. What are all of these gameplay videos of their most recent release doing on youtube (all of them uploaded by foreigners afaict)?
They aren't as bad as they used to be a few years ago, but that doesn't mean that they're ok either. Youtubers to this day still complain about Nintendo being out of touch all the time, where they actively go after people who are just fans of their IPs.
They aren't alone in this, just one example of many, such as the anime youtubers community (anitube), etc...
But to be clear, the statement in your original comment that I quoted
> you can just look at Nintendo who to this day still goes hard after Youtubers who just cover their games
(emphasis mine)
is false, right?
Popular titles like the "Fate/stay night" don't include much sexual material though. Labeling these as porn is like saying GoT is porn, and I suspect many people would object to that.
Imgur image (SFW) with a bunch of the sexual tags included in the games, since I'm not sure I can use that kind of language here: https://i.imgur.com/oXjnk13.png
They did eventually move away from pornography as the franchise got popular enough via the initial cult following. This isn't at all uncommon with visual novels, starting with pornographic content and moving away as adaptations to anime and manga are made and it reaches the mainstream.
Plus, it just re-affirms what I said: > They did eventually move away from pornography as the franchise got popular enough via the initial cult following. This isn't at all uncommon with visual novels, starting with pornographic content and moving away as adaptations to anime and manga are made and it reaches the mainstream.
Tsukihime, also from Type-Moon (developers of FATE), has recently gotten a remake which stripped away all the adult content (with no +18 patches of any sort).
For reference. Most of the top visual novels on VNDB (Visual Novel Database, the biggest information depository for the VN community) have adult content, but most aren't "NUKIGE", which is when the game primarily focuses on adult content over the plot. You can however, safely remove the adult content from most non-nukige visual novels without breaking the story beats.
Here's a link to the top 200 sorted by popularity https://vndb.org/v?q=&ch=&f=&s=33M might not be safe for work.