No, YouTube will not be made illegal in Japan

OK, I have to post this asap. A lot of people across the interwebs have been having a total shit storm panic attack about the new law passed in Japan that makes willful downloading of illegally copied content punishable by fines and jain time. As soon as word got out, every tech site or place that talks about Japan was screaming bloody murder that it would make even watching a video on YouTube illegal.

As I wrote before, this is simply not the case. If you look at the actual law it clearly states that temporary cache files that are saved to your hard drive when watching streaming videos do not fall under the law. So you can watch YouTube and Nico Nico to your heart's content and rest easy.

In fact, in order to be punished for an illegal download, you actually have to get a complaint from the copyright holder... meaning IMO it's most likely not going to really amount to much in the end, except to (hopefully) kill off sites where people go to just download buckets of shit.

If you want to know the exact details, watch the video above, Gimmeabreakman explains this better than I can.

Thanks, Victor (found on Japan Probe). Oh, and to the sites who freaked about this, I say fuck you unless you post an update where you tell your readers that streaming sites aren't going to be outlawed, because what you're doing is fear based journalism at its worst.

Update: Here's an article about the same issue at the Japan Times. It explains again how the law works and yes, downloading illegal videos and music will be punishable, but no YouTube and other streaming sites are fine. The post also clarifies on something I didn't know. The law does not make it illegal for you to share an mp3 file with a friend, and it also doesn't affect ripping CDs you rented from a shop (which has always been legal in Japan).