An Amendment Bill to part of the Copyright Act was presented to Congress on March 10 2009. The aim of the amendment is to speed up and advance the circulation of digital content. The amendment is a response to various problems that relate to the exploitation of copyright works on the Internet.
The three main goals of the Amendment include: to facilitate the exploitation of copyright material works on the internet; to prevent the illegal circulation of copyright material; and to improve the opportunity of physically challenged people to access copyright material.
The amendment will make it illegal to download sound or visual recordings of copyright materials even for private use if the downloader knows the material they intend to download was created without an appropriate licence. The amendment will also extend the ruling for compulsory licences to cover neighbouring rights. As many are already aware of the summary of the amendment, this will not be elaborated upon further. Rather, two observations relating to the amendment will be presented.
Before the amendment, there was much discussion on how the Copyright Act ought to be amended. The Agency for Cultural Affairs invited many lawyers, academics and corporate representatives to discuss appropriate changes to the Act. From these discussions, it was decided that the amendment should be limited to the downloading of sound and visual recordings only. Issues relating to the problem of copyrighted business software and games software being downloaded were postponed to be dealt with together at a later time. The discussion group reasoned that they had insufficient information to decide whether the downloading of games software ought to be restricted in the same way as sound and visual recordings under the amendment or not.
However, the amendment will restrict downloading of games software. The amendment will see the addition of Article 30, paragraph 1, item 3 to the Act. This provision restricts the downloading for private use of sound and visual recordings of copyrighted works which have been uploaded without an appropriate licence. As many games include music and video recordings (both of which are downloaded when the games software is downloaded), the downloading of copyrighted games software will be restricted by the amendment. This will apply where the person downloading the software knows that the material they intend to download was created without an appropriate licence.
The amendment has covered some of the same ground as the Act, but more explicitly releases the users of copyright materials from legal liability through exemptions. Accordingly, the amendment has narrowed the extent to which copyright content may be exploited. We should watch how the court's interpretation of existing exemptions might be influenced by the amendments, as well as continuing discussions by the committee, which is currently engaged in discussion on how the Act should be amended further. Items on the agenda for the future include fair use, compensation (in relation to Article 30(2) of the Act) and the terms of protection. It will be worth watching the moves of this Committee closely.
The amendment is expected to come into force on January 1 2010 as prescribed in Article 1 of the supplementary provisions.
Naoki Iguchi and Masato Nozaki