Beware of transcribing movies – the task may not be just tedious, but also dangerous, at least in Japan.
In that country, this can be considered a form of piracy, and has recently resulted in the arrests of three persons, said to be working for the same “company.”
However, reports about the case do not specify what kind of business entity this concerns – other than that money was earned in the process.
The charges against the suspects are based on their involvement in transcribing Godzilla Minus One and Overlord III movies without first obtaining permission from the copyright holders. This allegedly went on for about a year ending in February 2024.
While in much of the world media content “piracy” is mostly tied to video and audio, Japan has no fair use rule. For that reason, the fact that transcriptions – text – were used to write online articles, which generated ad money, landed the three men in jail.
The use of information from the transcriptions that are contested by rights holders is the mention of names of characters, quotes, descriptions of scenes, etc., in the case of Godzilla 1.0. The “Overlord III case” also included “relevant images” being added to the articles, once again based on the transcription.
This is considered a first-of-its-kind incident even in Japan. CODA – a Japanese organization “for content holders to cooperate in taking measures against piracy” – revealed that the arrests happened on October 29.
“This case was investigated by the Miyagi Prefectural Police, and CODA coordinated with the affected rights holders, which led to this crackdown,” the group announced.
CODA views the use of text obtained in this way as a “serious crime” on a par with what are known as “spoiler sites,” TorrentFreak writes.
According to the Japanese organization, once a person reads text transcribed from a movie, their desire to “pay a fair price for content” gets “reduced.” And that conjecture is clearly enough to get people arrested.
Now, the police are treating this as a case of conspiracy involving “company employees and management” that allegedly attracted a lot of clicks, and consequently generated revenue, which the movies’ copyright owners – Toho and Kadokawa corporations – believe is rightfully theirs.
