Japan has become the first country to punish, with nothing more and nothing less than prison, the publication of too detailed spoilers. The justification given by the Tokyo District Court that has issued the ruling is that, in some cases, amounts to copyright infringement.
Last Thursday, Wataru Takeuchi39, was found guilty of violating Japanese legislation that prohibits creating ‘a new work through creative modifications of the original while preserving its essential characteristics.’ Takeuchi worked as an administrator for a website that published very extensive and spoiler-filled descriptions of popular movies and series.. Two of his ‘articles’, one about the film ‘Godzilla Minus One‘ and another focused on the anime series ‘Overlord‘led to tohofranchise owner godzillaand Kadokawa Shotenthe publisher behind Overlord, to file joint lawsuits through the Overseas Content Distribution Association (CODA, for its acronym in English).
In a statement, CODA explains that Takeuchi and two other men were arrested in 2024 due to concerns that The publications on his ‘spoiler website’ included extensive transcripts of dialogue and numerous images. CODA recognizes that fair use allows entertainment journalists to publish excerpts of copyrighted material. But the organization maintains that, given the level of detail of the web publications, these They were essentially adaptations that could cause ‘significant harm to rights holders’ due to their potential to deter potential customers from paying to see the film or series..
‘A large number of websites that extract text from movies and other content have been identified and are considered problematic, such as so-called spoiler websites. Although these actions are often perceived as less serious than piracy sites or illegal uploads that publish the content itself, constitute clear copyright infringements that exceed the scope of fair use and are serious crimes‘, says CODA.
According to Tom’s Hardware, one of the key arguments of the association is that the Takeuchi website showed ads in their postswhich meant that I could monetize the publication of copyrighted intellectual property. Although Takeuchi did not write the offending posts, in 2023 he managed to earn 38 million yen, about 203,000 eurosthanks to web advertising. Now he has been sentenced to one year and six months in prison and to pay a fine of 1 million yen, approximately 5,300 euros.. CODA states that it plans to ‘work for adequate copyright protection and apply effective measures against similar websites‘.