“Ending” the anti-piracy conference -1

“Ending” the anti-piracy conference -1         

 The anti-piracy conference has been indefinitely postponed. My tasks as chairman are over for the time being.

The current “situation” is that:

・We will coordinate to review the results of the actions we were able to take up to this point, such as measures regarding legitimate versions as well as creating a legal framework regarding leech sites.

・The issue of legislating blocking is “unresolved”.

 As the harm caused by piracy worsened, an uproar was created for and against the government’s “emergency evacuation” explanation regarding the old topic of blocking. Perhaps because of this, the issue of piracy subsided for a while, and the government set up a task force that has held nine sessions of focused discussion.

 The general situation regarding blocking has been that publishers and right holders have been in favor of it, while telecommunications companies and ISPs have been against it. Still, complexities have existed within each industry, and opinions have been divided. There are also industry affairs that cannot be discussed at this table, and no industry is one-dimensional.

 The government and the secretariat also had the suspicion that declaring the creation of a legal system would be overbearing. The facts were that opinions were divided among stakeholders in the government, such as the Prime Minister’s residence, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and the internal adjustments sometimes exceeded the adjustments in society in their intensity.

 The situation was that neither the sides for and against the issue were fully happy. All that had happened was that the points of disagreement as well as the main issues had become clear.

As this conference was not a place to decide on the legislation of blocking, but rather a place to focus on questions at hand, I believe that it fulfilled its role.

 I took a neutral stance. As I was the chairman of the intellectual-property headquarters, some also labeled me as someone on the side of copyright. However, I have been proud of my work in telecommunications policy before this, and attach equal importance to both sides.

 Although I had a lot of content-related work this time, working on the formulation of systems regarding the Telecommunications Business Act at the time of the liberalization of telecommunications was my start as a working adult in society, and this is where I have my origins. That both sides could aim to solve the problem without breaking apart - I racked my brains for this one goal.

 Moreover, I think an important result of this meeting was that we were able to almost reach a consensus on 10 issues apart from blocking.

I’ve made a special note of three of them at the start.

1. The long-term measure is education. If literacy is not maintained among users, regulations will be placed on the Internet.

2. The medium-term is legitimate versions. We need legitimate versions that are as attractive as Mangamura.

3. The short-term measure is creating a system through coordination between government and the people.

 The question now is whether this coordinated system will be possible. If a scheme can be created to carry out measures through coordination between publishers and right holders on one hand and telecommunications companies and ISPs on the other, the first step is to carry out and review this scheme. If this is not possible, this will be a pretext to move towards the legislation of blocking.

I think that the fact that the conference on countermeasures ran aground and was postponed was also because the ball had been thrown to the people.