The Age of Music Piracy Continues As Japan Makes Illegal Downloading A Punishable Offense

IIn the past 24 hours it has emerged that the Upper House of Japan’s legislature – The House of Councillors – has approved a bill which will make downloading of pirated content a punishable offense for the first time in Japanese law.

The bill, which becomes active in October this year, means that downloading pirated content will be punishable by a maximum two year jail sentence and/or a fine of up to $25,124.

Although a 2010 amendment to Japanese legislation established illegal downloading as an offense, hitherto only offenders who upload pirated content faced criminal penalties for their actions.

But the legislation includes an anachronism in that it makes the backing up of a DVD a punishable offense.

This, against the backdrop of confusion over the legality of ripping – otherwise known as digital audio extraction – in the United States and the United Kingdom, is a particularly unwelcome move by the National Diet of Japan (Japan’s legislature).

Paul Boutin, writing for Wired in November 2010, argued that “music is so cheap, there’s no reason not to buy”, but the continuing war on copyright infringement, most recently in evidence in Japan, suggests that the age of music piracy is alive and well.

According to the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ), digital music sales amounted to $904,954,672 in 2011, which the RIAJ attributed to a 22% decline in both in unit and value of mobile digital contents, which account for 81% of the Japanese digital music market. Japan’s struggles with widespread music piracy have been widely attributed to the use of mobile phones, with which songs are traded over messaging forums – a method uncommon to the rest of the world.

The bill was approved after the Upper House of the Japanese Diet voted 221-12 in favour of approval.

Samuel Agini is the Editor of Andrew Apanov’s Dotted Music.