He received two years in prison and a 1 million yen fine.

Japanese YouTuber convicted of copyright violation after uploading Let’s Play videos::A 53-year-old Japanese man has been convicted of copyright infringement after uploading gameplay videos of visual novel Steins;Gate: My Darling’s Embrace and videos summarizing Spy × Family and Steins;Gate anime episodes.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•1 year ago

    IIRC, the reality of gaming YouTube videos and streams is that you do it with permission from the studio. I heard that arrangements for streamers are built into the license for the software since streaming is obviously beneficial for many studios. Even so, some content creators still get written permission from publishers to stream. (Frost on YouTube got permission from HiRez to stream Smite, for example.) if a studio says you can’t stream the game, they have the right to enforce it.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•1 year ago

      To my knowledge, almost zero games incorporate licenses that actually give any legal space or protection for streaming, it’s almost always a “we 100% have the right to sue you but we probably won’t, we totes promise fr fr” kind of situation.

      But for this case in particular, what’s actually happening is that Japan is one of the strictest countries in the world w.r.t. copyright law; I can’t know the laws of every country in the world, but in 90% of jurisdictions the worst you’d expect to happen is the videos get taken down, maybe your channel gets deleted.

      Don’t screw around with copyright law in Japan though.