New Japanese Laws Criminalize Unlicensed Manga Downloads

Not much to say about this, since I know very little about Japanese law, but I did find it interesting enough to note. According to TorrentFreak,

Japan’s parliament passed new copyright amendments Friday that ban the unlicensed downloading of manga, magazines, and academic texts from the internet, in line with the previously outlawed media categories.

In common with the penalties already available for movies and music, those illegally downloading publications from the Internet now face a theoretical sentence of two years in prison or a fine of up to two million yen (US$18,300) [as of January 1, 2021]….

Index sites, those that don’t host but link to sites that do, will also be outlawed, as of October, with “a sentence of up to five years in prison, a maximum fine of five million yen (US$45,760), or in some cases, both.”

This criminalizes the user, not the hoster, and even those who say “there is copyright violating material over there”. It will be interesting to see how this changes the availability of manga scans online.