Shibuya is a special ward in Tokyo, Japan. A major commercial and finance center, Shibuya houses two of the busiest railway stations in the world, Shinjuku Station and Shibuya Station.
Copyrights can either be licensed or assigned by the owner of the copyright. A copyright collective is a non-governmental body created by copyright law or private agreement which licenses copyrighted works on behalf of the authors and engages in collective rights management. Copyright societies track all the events and venues where copyrighted works are used and ensure that the copyright holders listed with the society are remunerated for such usage. The copyright society publishes its own tariff scheme on its websites and collects a nominal administrative fee on every transaction.
Anime International Company, Inc., often abbreviated as AIC, is a Japanese animation studio founded on June 15, 1982 and located in Nerima, Tokyo, Japan. On December 10, 2015, AIC RIGHTS Company, Inc. was established through a company split, in which AIC Rights received the transfer of some of the copyrights owned by Anime International Company.
A royalty payment is a payment made by one party to another that owns a particular asset, for the right to ongoing use of that asset. Royalties are typically agreed upon as a percentage of gross or net revenues derived from the use of an asset or a fixed price per unit sold of an item of such, but there are also other modes and metrics of compensation. A royalty interest is the right to collect a stream of future royalty payments.
Bandai Visual Co., Ltd. was a Japanese anime, film production, and distribution company, established by Bandai and a subsidiary of Bandai Namco Holdings. They focused mainly in international distribution of anime properties in North America.
Share is the name for a closed-source P2P application being developed in Japan by ファイル倉庫, a pseudonym translating as 'file warehouse.' Share was developed to be the successor to Winny. Like Winny, Share functions using a distributed data store referred to as a cache with each computer acting as a node in the network. Netagent published a survey in June 2018 suggesting that Share was the third most popular p2p network in Japan after Winny and Perfect Dark (P2P) with approximately 10,000 nodes connecting each day over Golden Week, down from 30,000 in 2015.
APRA AMCOS consists of Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) and Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society (AMCOS), both copyright management organisations or copyright collectives which jointly represent over 100,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers in Australia and New Zealand. The two organisations work together to license public performances and administer performance, communication and reproduction rights on behalf of their members, who are creators of musical works, aiming to ensure fair payments to members and to defend their rights under the Australian Copyright Act (1968).
The Hōsō Bangumi Chosakuken Hogo Kyōgikai (放送番組著作権保護協議会), commonly abbreviated as Hōbankyō (放番協), and known in English as the Council for Protection of Copyright of Television Program of Japan is an organization representing Japan-based television networks, motion picture producers, Japanese anime manufacturers, screenwriters and record companies. Hōbankyō enforces intellectual property laws in areas both within and outside Japan for their clients. In cooperation with other domestic and international law enforcement agencies around the world, Hōbankyō cracks down on organizations that illegally distribute Japanese entertainment content protected by Hōbankyō.
The Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers, often referred to as JASRAC, is a Japanese copyright collection society. It was founded in 1939 as a nonprofit organization, and is the largest musical copyright administration society in Japan.
Sweat of the brow is a copyright law doctrine. According to this doctrine, an author gains rights through simple diligence during the creation of a work, such as a database, or a directory. Substantial creativity or "originality" is not required.
Japanese copyright laws consist of two parts: "Author's Rights" and "Neighbouring Rights". As such, "copyright" is a convenient collective term rather than a single concept in Japan. Japan was a party to the original Berne convention in 1899, so its copyright law is in sync with most international regulations. The 1899 law protected copyrighted works for 30 years after the author's death. Law changes promulgated in 1970 extended the duration to 50 years. However, in 2004 Japan further extended the copyright term to 70 years for cinematographic works. At the end of 2018, as a result of the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations and a requirement stemming from the EU–Japan Economic Partnership Agreement., the 70 year term was applied to all works. This new term was not applied retroactively; works that had entered the public domain between 1999 and 29 December 2018 (inclusive) due to expiration remained in the public domain.
The Music Copyright Society of China (MCSC) (中国音乐著作权协会) is the country's only officially recognized organization for music copyright administration and has issued copyrights for over 14 million music works for approximately 8,000 members.
Music Reports provides music rights licensing, administration, royalty accounting, and software development and hosting. Music Reports operates the largest registry of worldwide music rights and related business information.
Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) is a U.S. company based in Danvers, Massachusetts,, that provides collective copyright licensing services for corporate and academic users of copyrighted materials. CCC procures agreements with rightsholders, primarily academic publishers, and then acts as their agent in arranging collective licensing for institutions and one-time licensing for document delivery services, coursepacks, and other access and uses of texts.
Mac Akasaka, real name Makoto Tonami, is a Japanese businessman, political activist and perennial candidate. He was born in Nagoya, grew up in a struggling family, and attended Kyoto University. He spent 25 years as an executive at the trading company Itochu, where he built a rare-earth metals trading business and ultimately retired early with a 120 million yen severance package. He went into politics after his retirement. He now manages the Smile Therapy Association in Akasaka, Tokyo. Akasaka claims to have personal assets of billions of yen, which he uses to cover the cost of his political campaigns.
File sharing in Japan is notable for both its size and sophistication.
Warner/Chappell Music Inc. et al. v. Fullscreen Inc. et al. (13-cv-05472) was a case against multi-channel network Fullscreen, filed by the National Music Publishers Association on behalf of Warner/Chappell Music and 15 other music publishers, which alleged that Fullscreen illegally reaped the profits of unlicensed cover videos on YouTube without paying any royalties to the rightful publishers and songwriters.
Mangamura was a Japanese piracy website that primarily hosted popular Japanese manga books. Besides manga books, it also hosted pirated copies of magazines and photo-books.
The Pokémondoujinshi incident (ポケモン同人誌事件) refers to the incident where a Japanese doujinshi artist who sold erotic mangas of Pokémon in 1999 was arrested on suspicion of violating Japan's copyright laws, creating a media furor as well as an academic analysis in Japan of the copyright issues around doujinshi.
