Japan police arrest 44 in nationwide internet piracy crackdown

[Ceewan]

Police in Japan have arrested 44 people suspected of being involved in illegal Internet file-sharing. Raids in over 90 locations across the country targeted individuals suspected of downloading and distributing a wide range of content including movies, music, anime, manga and software. If convicted they face fines and up to ten years in jail.

According to an announcement by the National Police Agency (NPA), in recent days officers across Japan carried out raids against individuals believed to have downloaded and shared a variety of content without obtaining permission from copyright holders.

In a three-day long crackdown between February 16 and 18, police in 29 prefectures searched 93 locations, eventually arresting a total of 44 people. All are suspected of engaging in online piracy of either movies, music, anime, manga or computer software. All were detained under the Copyright Act.

A wide variety of heavyweight industry groups were behind the action including the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (MPAJ), the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ), the Japan Video Software Association (JVA) and the Software Alliance (BSA).

According to the Association of Copyright for Computer Software (ACCS) the large-scale crackdown on Internet pirates is the seventh of its type since 2009.

Those detained include a 55-year-old office worker who along with the others faces fines between $1,785 and $89,200 (200,000 to 10 million yen) and jail sentences of up to ten years, depending on their offense.

Until 2012 only uploading was considered a criminal offense in Japan but in that same year local authorities upgraded mere downloading to a crime carrying jail sentences of up to two years.

It’s an important point then that police report the suspects as mostly using “shared folder” style P2P applications, a method of sharing that has remained popular in Asia despite the worldwide rise of software such as BitTorrent. Users of this software tend to both share and distribute content for extended periods of time, thus opening them up to the harshest sentences.

Source:
https://torrentfreak.com/japan-police-arrest-44-in-nationwide-internet-piracy-crackdown-160224/

 

[Casshern2]

Thanks. Interesting

 

[Ceewan]

Thanks. Interesting

Pertinent.

 

[tylersailer]

thanks for the share, Ceewan. Quick google news search gave me little results though. Looks like it is no big deal for ordinary people? Or it is just that police want to remind us once in a while that we can get arrested if we do too much piracy.

 

[Ceewan]

Quick google news search gave me little results though. Looks like it is no big deal for ordinary people? Or it is just that police want to remind us once in a while that we can get arrested if we do too much piracy.

I am unsure of Torrentfreaks source but I also am unable to corraborate as of yet. Japantoday dot com has a "crime" section that includes such tidbits as "Woman, boyfriend force her daughter to eat 30 pet goldfish" and "Man arrested for disposing of hedgehog, turtles in public spaces" but they have nothing on this matter that I saw (and here is the best news twitter account I have ever seen! https://twitter.com/the_japan_news ).

However Torrentfreak has their finger on the pulse of filesharing news and likely got this news from personal emails from people involved or from those that personally know them. This small "filesharing news site" regularly shares emails with anti-filesharing organizations (when they choose to answer), the piratebay staff as well as the staff of other torrent sites, the makers of popcorntime and others filesharing entrepeneurs, and I have even exchanged an email or two with them myself in the past. So even though they were a few days slow about reporting the death of Ryushare a few years back I would trust their sources. They don't report rumors without saying that is what they are, although they have been know to print the rare retraction (humbly). As an interesting note this post in Torrentfreak was not only "tagged" Japan but also anime, even though nothing about anime was mentioned. Not sure if that is pertinent or not but it caught my attention.

 

[tylersailer]

Wow thanks for writeup. I did additional research and yes, Sankei newspaper reported the raid in Japanese edition but not in English. I guess torrentfreak got it from there. It's interesting to know the community-feeling torrentfreak has, just like you said they share what they personally hear/obtain about the news and such. Yes it is their big concern if pirating becomes harder, but still it is people who are passionate about their things. Just like AO here I believe.

The torrentfreak tagged it anime probably because it was movie and anime they uploaded, or so the police said. Or, you know, because anything Japanese is anime...

..."Woman, boyfriend force her daughter to eat 30 pet goldfish"...

...Wait what? That's another sick incident...

 

[Ceewan]

..."Woman, boyfriend force her daughter to eat 30 pet goldfish"...

...Wait what? That's another sick incident...

Yeah. I don't pour over every news article because newspapers tend to sensationilize things and making the abnormal look like everyday occurences. But this was pretty bad:

TOKYO —

A woman forced her teenage daughter to eat more than 30 of her pet goldfish as a punishment, police and media said, as the country grapples with a record number of child abuse cases.

Yuko Ogata and her boyfriend Takeshi Egami, who have both been arrested, made the 16-year-old girl eat the dead fish last June, police told AFP, adding that the daughter was allegedly abused on a daily basis.

Local media said the couple, who live in Fukuoka Prefecture, killed the fish by pouring detergent into their tank.

The girl was then forced to eat more than 30 of the fish one by one, according to the Nippon Television Network.

No damage to the daughter’s health has been reported, according to local media.

Ogata and Egami were reportedly indicted last year for tying the daughter to a bed with rope, punching her in the face and burning her tongue with a lit cigarette.

The latest arrest was their fifth since last year in relation to abuse of the child, reports said.

The case is just the latest in a string of such shocking incidents in Japan.

Last month, a three-year-old girl died after her mother deliberately poured boiling water on her, causing serious burns to her face.

Police arrested the mother and her boyfriend for negligence in caring for a child.

According to the health ministry, Japan’s child protection centers dealt with a record 89,000 abuse cases in the year ending March 2015.


Why would they allow those people to be free, let alone allow them to back in that poor teenagers life. Still, I have a very hard time accepting that this is anything than a rare huge mistake on the part of Japans' justice system. They need to do their best to atone for it and give that teenager a safer environment to live in, not to mention remove those animals who call themselves parents from society. Prison or the nuthouse seriously sounds appropriate here. I don't care how bad a kid misbehaves there is no excuse for that, she may never fully recover from abuse like that.

 

[WillEater]

I like fish sticks

 

[Ceewan]

I like fish sticks

battered or fried?

 

[WillEater]

battered or fried?

 

[Ceewan]

what are you trying to say? ( I saw that episode by the way, it was funny) I was thinking tempura not sausage meat.