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Japanese cops arrest anti-DRM journalists

by on23 July 2012



You can't tell people how to back up DVDs


Big Content has had win in Japan after its tame police officers silenced a tech magazine by jailing journalists. Four hacks who published a magazine last year which contained an article which told people how to back up a DVD have been arrested.
The four worked for Sansai Books  and they have been arrested for selling, through the company website, a copy of a magazine published last year.

Big Content complained that the floor had violated Japan's Unfair Competition Prevention Law which it had managed to get revised to make illegal the sale of any DRM circumvention device or software. Various blogs have pointed out that the same law could be used to arrest the Amazon Japan CEO too as the online giant is selling a lot of magazines, books and software packages for DVD copy and ripping. However Big Content does not seem to want to bring down a big supplier of its goods, it just wants to shut the press up.

The Japanese have been bringing in all sorts of anti-piracy laws which Big Content favours.  This from this October downloading a single illegal MP3 could land a Japanese p2p user two years jail. The law also has hit Linux distributions which come pre-installed with libdvdcss which is most of them.

Strangely there is no one in Japan who is standing up for their fellow journalists.  Either they are too frightened, or they feel that a journalist who appears to break the law much immediately bow to the government and fillet themselves with with a carving knife. 

More here.  

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