Japanese Supreme Court Rules TV Forwarding Illegal 177
eldavojohn writes "If you use anything like a Slingbox in Japan, you may be dismayed to find out that a Japanese maker of a similar service has been successfully sued by Japan Broadcasting Corp. and five Tokyo-based local TV broadcasting firms under copyright violations for empowering users to do similar things. TV forwarding or place shifting is recording and/or moving your normal TV signal from its intended living room box to your home computer or anywhere on the internet. Turns out that Japan's Supreme Court overruled lower court decisions confirming fears that to even facilitate this functionality is a copyright infringement on the work that is being transferred."
Targeted: Fansubbers (Score:2, Interesting)
This is designed to prevent anime fansubbers from capturing raw broadcasts, subtitling them, and distributing them in the US and Europe before there are licensing deals (which are now negotiated after first run in Japan based on popularity there, and most shows aren't licensed) to protect the sales of DVDs and Blu-Rays.
It's bullshit.
Re:Wait...what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Are they pissed you aren't buying another TV Provider's box?
This is the same country that, due to special interest groups, made it illegal to rent video games or consoles while leaving it perfectly legal to do the same with other types of media including dvds and music cds. This includes "selling" those video games for a week or two with the agreed upon idea of "buying it back" a week later for 10 dollars less than the original price.
So yeah, that's probably why they're doing it.
Re:Wait...what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes. This is basically the thing. But its better to have somewhat more context: we are talking about a country with amazingly fast internet connection. Neigbourghoods are in esence connected with what we call "ethernet speed" so it's not uninimaginable that some guy buys such device and feeds his pay-per-view stream to his building's router, effectively allowing all their neigbourghs to view tv for free (or just imagine a college building the day of superbowl or victoria's secret show...).