A Japanese court has meted out harsh punishment to a YouTuber for breaching copyright and posting spoilers. The video game content creator is seemingly among the first in the world to be arrested for posting gameplay clips.
You don’t often hear of copyright arrests. Usually in the West, copyright law is wielded relatively softly by platforms against content creators using licensed material.
Sometimes creators like Adin Ross and Colleen Ballinger are even accused of taking advantage of it to protect their image. Of course, their legal teams will usually deny that outright.
Full-blown arrests and jail time are certainly out of the ordinary. That’s what makes this case of a Japanese YouTuber being fined 1 million Yen and being jailed for two years over copyright breach so shocking.
YouTuber Shinobu Yoshida was found guilty posting a let's play of Steins;Gate: My Darling's Embrace, sentenced to 2 years prison (suspended for 5 years) and a 1 mil yen fine.It's the first time someone has been found guilty of copyright infringement by posting gameplay videos. pic.twitter.com/JWsMN1uEJM
— Kars (@KaroshiMyriad) September 7, 2023
Earlier this year on May 24, Shinobu Yoshida was reportedly arrested for uploading videos containing gameplay footage from STEINS;GATE Hiyoku Renri no Darin. The game is a visual novel popular in Japan and Yoshida posted content including the ending.
His prosecution was spearheaded by the Content Overseas Distribution Agency (CODA) which focuses solely on copyright protection. Yoshida has been found guilty after he admitted to knowingly breaking the law in court documents.
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“I knew it was illegal as I was doing it,” Yoshida admitted in a police interview. The 52-year-old has been fined the equivalent of $6,785 (USD) and sentenced to two years in prison with a five-year suspended sentence.
The sentence is hefty compared to the usual demonetization tactics or video removal we usually see applied by content platforms. CODA is notoriously strict, however. “Although he knew he was infringing copyright, he continued to post for financial gain,” a representative said in a (translated) press release.
This instance was part of a crackdown on so-called ‘fast-content’. It’s a popular genre in Japan and it sounds like similar practices occur elsewhere given CODA’s description of it in their press release.
“The act of combining only the movie scenes of a game with a story and editing it so that the content of the game can be understood in a short time up to the ending. Or the act of extracting and posting only the ending scene has been viewed as a problem these days,” they said.
