4 ms·

> How/why is it that their copyright law allows them to literally make a copy but not scan and send it? Total speculation: but maybe there's a narrow fair use

by tivert 3y ago

> How/why is it that their copyright law allows them to literally make a copy but not scan and send it? Total speculation: but maybe there's a narrow fair use exception that only applies to photocopies. Which makes a certain amount of sense: a photocopy suffers generation loss, but a digital scan can be infinitely duplicated perfectly.

leoc 3y ago
Certainly such compulsory-licensing schemes for photocopying of books in libraries are not uncommon: the ALCS hands out the money from the UK's, for instance https://www.alcs.co.uk/where-the-money-comes-from https://www.alcs.co.uk/where-the-money-comes-from . Japan's scheme still not allowing the national library to share digital scans would certainly fit the conventional wisdom about that country being slow to embrace digitisation, but really the digital-lending-rights situation is probably a bin-fire everywhere, just not in quite the same way everywhere. And in fact I think Japanese law might be unusually generous (IANAL!) if it lets the national library copy an arbitrary number of magazine pages for anyone anywhere in the world.
sirn 3y ago
Article 31 of Japan's copyright law (著作権法第31条) gives National Diet Library (and a few approved public libraries) a special exception which allows them to make a photocopy of a copyrighted material as long as it's "for researching purpose", "part of a work" (i.e., less than 50% of a book or an article), and "one copy per person".[1] IANAL, but I think it could be that a digital copy is no longer "one copy per person" as you can make unlimited copies from it, as well as sending it digitally is already making two copies between sender and receiver. [1]: https://www.cric.or.jp/english/clj/cl2.html https://www.cric.or.jp/english/clj/cl2.html (Article 31)^1 ^1: Though this translation is slightly outdated, there were some revisions to copyright law in 2021, but this part is mostly unaffected.

by tivert 3y ago

leoc 3y ago

Certainly such compulsory-licensing schemes for photocopying of books in libraries are not uncommon: the ALCS hands out the money from the UK's, for instance https://www.alcs.co.uk/where-the-money-comes-from https://www.alcs.co.uk/where-the-money-comes-from . Japan's scheme still not allowing the national library to share digital scans would certainly fit the conventional wisdom about that country being slow to embrace digitisation, but really the digital-lending-rights situation is probably a bin-fire everywhere, just not in quite the same way everywhere. And in fact I think Japanese law might be unusually generous (IANAL!) if it lets the national library copy an arbitrary number of magazine pages for anyone anywhere in the world.

sirn 3y ago

Article 31 of Japan's copyright law (著作権法第31条) gives National Diet Library (and a few approved public libraries) a special exception which allows them to make a photocopy of a copyrighted material as long as it's "for researching purpose", "part of a work" (i.e., less than 50% of a book or an article), and "one copy per person".[1] IANAL, but I think it could be that a digital copy is no longer "one copy per person" as you can make unlimited copies from it, as well as sending it digitally is already making two copies between sender and receiver. [1]: https://www.cric.or.jp/english/clj/cl2.html https://www.cric.or.jp/english/clj/cl2.html (Article 31)^1 ^1: Though this translation is slightly outdated, there were some revisions to copyright law in 2021, but this part is mostly unaffected.