On May 8 in Japan, the Kyoto Prefectural Police arrested a 58-year-old unemployed man from Kyoto City for violating the Copyright Law being suspected of facilitating access to anime piracy. In fact, it is mentioned that the subject got more than 10 million yen (more than 74 thousand US dollars) from site ad revenue alone.
According to the police report, Between December 2021 and October 2022, the man posted two pirated versions of movies such as “Jujutsu Kaisen 0” on internet sites, and posted the links to those posts on his main site.. This is known as an “aggregator site” since it does not host any of the videos, but provides access to all the external content that the administrator wants.
The site in question achieved more than 5 million hits during the period in question. The subject obtained financial remuneration thanks to the inclusion of advertising on the site, which offers profit to the administrator based on the number of visits to the site. According to the Overseas Content Distribution Association (CODA), which collects information on Japan’s content piracy around the world, the impact of content piracy in 2022 was around 2 trillion yen, five times more than what was registered in 2019.
This is due to a lack of regulatory awareness among users, and CODA and other entities intend to soon develop a class titled “Digital Etiquette” for middle and high school students across Japan to delve deeper into the knowledge of copyright. A professor at Kobe University, an expert on Internet crime, has stated: “Aggregator sites are tantamount to terrorism against culture. If the income does not affect copyright holders, the culture will decline, and this will end up affecting users to the detriment».
Anyway, this was shared on comment forums in Japan:
- «It’s hard to find them, but if they continue, the content creators could retire».
- «Maybe copyright laws in other countries are pathetic?».
- «This time, the aggregator site was running on a server and domain hosted in Japan, so it was relatively easy to identify and stop it. But the reality is that other hacking sites operated on foreign hosting and domains can operate completely anonymously and are harder to stop.».
- «Legal manners and knowledge need to be disclosed, but the problem is also the low threshold of disclosure, which can be done with the tip of a finger».
