Ordering Photocopies from Japan's National Library | Hacker News Reader

Ordering Photocopies from Japan's National Library

blog.gingerbeardman.com

86 pointsmsephton33 comments

Recently I have been looking for a specific issue of an old 1985 Japanese PC magazine, but there are non currently for sale, nor have there been any sold for some time judging by sold listings. Over the past several years what I would normally do in this scenario is play the waiting game and hope one pops up for sale and that I can win it. But this time I decided to play things a little different, after finding a detailed table of contents for the magazine at Japan’s National Diet Library (NDL) and seeing that they offered a remote duplication service.

I thought I’d document this very useful, somewhat archaic, but thoroughly charming process.

If you want to help others in your exact situation, scan the scans and put them on the internet archive.

Wouldn't that qualify as copyright infringement...?

Yes, like much of IA's content it is. If the copyright holders object they can DMCA claim it.

I will do something alone those lines, and more, at some point in the future if/when I secure my own copy of the magazine.

You criminal. You knowingly support copyright infringement. You represent what is wrong with the world. I hope they put your dumb face on toilet paper in China and force you to go around file DMCA claims to take it down.

Posting like this will get you banned on HN, as it's completely against the rules. You've unfortunately been breaking them in other comments too. Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended from now on? That means (among other things) no personal attacks, no name-calling, no flamewar, and so on. We want respectful, thoughtful, and above all curious conversation.

You have no idea what you're talking about. You also have no idea how to reply to the correct comment on this website.

Very interesting, but you left me wanting more information. What was so special about this magazine? And I assume one particular article, since you only needed 3 pages.

It was a feature describing a computer game written by a reader of the magazine. That makes it pretty much as old as Tetris. The source code listing was elsewhere in the magazine, so involved a separate request. I'm sure I'll blog about the specifics in future as that is a really interesting story in and of itself.

Interesting! I was really hoping to see the copies at the end, but realized you'd be violating the very copyright policy you had to obey to get them.

Thanks. This was very informative. Would you mind telling us the magazine title? I'm just curious.

Sure! It was Monthly ASCII, 1985-11, No.101 https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/3250694/1/1

Unrelated, but you can order prints of paintings from e.g. the US National Gallery of Art, and the UK National Gallery.

https://customprints.nga.gov/

https://shop.nationalgallery.org.uk/

Same for the National Library of France:

https://gallica.bnf.fr/accueil/en/content/accueil-en

https://gallica-bnf-fr.translate.goog/blog/11122015/des-tira...

This is possibly the most Japanese thing I can imagine - I both love and hate it at the same time.

I'm only surprised there is no faxing involved.

The trusting yet maximally awkward payment process where you get paper invoices and need to mail around links is super Japanese though.

There was an opportunity to fax during the payment process. I probably would have done so if I had an easy way to fax, just for kicks.

This is cool, I'm imagining the slight confusion of a Japanese librarian to scan three pages of an old computer magazine and ship it to the UK. Curious though, what's so interesting about the TOC to have it physically?

The TOC is online, they used it to find the page range they're interested in.

That's correct!

Reminds me of being a student in the uk in the late eighties / early nineties and ordering stuff from the British Library document supply centre. First burrow into the microfiche indexes to find the full citations of the obscure stuff, then fill in the paper form, then wait a few weeks for the fat envelope of photocopies to arrive at the uni library. Definite need to plan ahead back then.

How/why is it that their copyright law allows them to literally make a copy but not scan and send it?

Seems strange in the US but even in the UK (for example) some digital scans have a 25-year copyright protection added:

> Typographical copyright

> If scanning a copyright-expired work from a British publication, typographical copyright must be borne in mind. This subsists for 25 years from creation of the publication and covers the typographical arrangement of the publication. It does not exist in the United States.

This is an important reminder that the US is one of the weirdest countries when it comes to copyright (despite the lobbying done by Disney, MPA and RIAA it's still one of the most liberal IP regimes in the world).

> How/why is it that their copyright law allows them to literally make a copy but not scan and send it?

Total speculation: but maybe there's a narrow fair use exception that only applies to photocopies. Which makes a certain amount of sense: a photocopy suffers generation loss, but a digital scan can be infinitely duplicated perfectly.

Article 31 of Japan's copyright law (著作権法第31条) gives National Diet Library (and a few approved public libraries) a special exception which allows them to make a photocopy of a copyrighted material as long as it's "for researching purpose", "part of a work" (i.e., less than 50% of a book or an article), and "one copy per person".[1]

IANAL, but I think it could be that a digital copy is no longer "one copy per person" as you can make unlimited copies from it, as well as sending it digitally is already making two copies between sender and receiver.

[1]: https://www.cric.or.jp/english/clj/cl2.html (Article 31)^1

^1: Though this translation is slightly outdated, there were some revisions to copyright law in 2021, but this part is mostly unaffected.

Certainly such compulsory-licensing schemes for photocopying of books in libraries are not uncommon: the ALCS hands out the money from the UK's, for instance https://www.alcs.co.uk/where-the-money-comes-from . Japan's scheme still not allowing the national library to share digital scans would certainly fit the conventional wisdom about that country being slow to embrace digitisation, but really the digital-lending-rights situation is probably a bin-fire everywhere, just not in quite the same way everywhere. And in fact I think Japanese law might be unusually generous (IANAL!) if it lets the national library copy an arbitrary number of magazine pages for anyone anywhere in the world.

Why does American copyright law generally allow a 30 second clip of an otherwise copyrighted video to be used?

Laws are different

The US government have been trying to harmonize (read: pushing the US version to other country) the copyright law with treaties.

It's a library national law thing to spread knowledge. The Chinese culture went one step further it does not allow you monopoly to an idea where copying is encourage to promote innovation and spread of knowledge.

You're making an assumption that what the librarians is doing is lawful. It may or may not. Librarians are not lawyers. We also don't know if these librarians are breaking the law knowing or unknowingly. (AU lawyer, no idea about Japanese copyright law)

Libraries, backed by professional associations and legal departments, usually follow developments regarding copyright laws (at least on a national level) very closely und provide detailed guidelines for their employees on how to handle these kinds of requests. Your typical librarian is probably more knowledgeable about copyright regulations than the average citizen. Also, some librarians are also legal professionals (I'm friends with two such persons).

I think it is a modarately safe bet that the people who designed the processes used by the official library of the Japanese parliament have a reasonable grasp of the applicable laws.

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