Anti-piracy downloading law - no need to panic, people

OK, so September came and went and now we have a new anti-piracy law out in Japan. It's not actually a new law, though, it merely amends an old one that made uploading pirated videos and music punishable by a 10 year jail term or up to a 10 million yen fine.

So what does  the new law really mean? Yes, it makes downloading illegal copies of videos and music punishable by up to 2 million yen or a 2 year prison sentence. But a lot of freaking out is going on about whether or not it makes YouTube and other streaming sites illegal to even browse, and there's a general state of panic on a bunch of online boards.

Let me clear up the issue as simply as possible:

The law:

• Makes it illegal to knowingly download pirated stuff. Methinks this clause was put in to make old lady who just borrowed her son's computer to watch a video safe, while specifically targeting people chomping down gobs and gobs of data from bittorrent servers that stand out like a sore thumb.
• Makes it illegal to rip a DVD to your computer. Kind of a bummer, since it does include DVDs you legally bought for yourself.

On the other hand, the law:

• Does not make watching videos on streaming sites illegal, even if the video is an illegal copy.
• Doesn't make copying CDs to your hard drive illegal, nor does it make it illegal to share a copy of an mp3 with a friend (which has always been legal in Japan).

The one place where average joe watching YouTube might get caught up is if he's using a program to save the YouTube videos to his hard drive. Other than that, for the most part the law doesn't really affect most people in any way.

Oh, and before you panic, the cache your computer saves when you watch a streaming video is not grounds to get you in trouble. The law very specifically covers this.

Of course, the main group of people scared are those who sit in Japan and download movies the day after they came out in the US. They say they do it because the movie will take so long to come out in Japan and blah blah blah. Yes, you people could get in trouble if the law (and the copyright holders) come looking.

To those people I say... Um... stop it? Just find something else to watch or get the content legally. Sheesh, I mean, will it really kill you to wait even a year to watch anything?

Here is a post I wrote about the subject a bit ago, with a video explaining other details of the law.