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The GameOnline arrest reared its face to me the other day as I was looking for information on KID -- modern girl-game maker, yes, but in the past they were one of the best technical-oriented game developers in Japan. (They made all of Taxan's good NES games, and Kick Master, if that means anything to you.)
There was a page devoted entirely to KID's past, called Memories, but a week ago virtually everything on the site was taken down except for a simple softography. The webmaster explains the reasoning behind this in his online diary: "Up to now publishers have given silent consent to [screenshot posting], so everyone was desensitized to it, but the fact remains that it's a crime under current law. I'm sure companies aren't going to waste their funds going around stamping out sites posting screens without permission like little ants, but with things like this happening, it's safer to be on the careful side. Still, this also served to make me take another look at this site, and that made me realize I had been relying too much on the power of screenshots. I don't think it's a total loss; personally, I think there's also something to gain here. It's like I've been in this lukewarm bath for so long. I imagine it'll take some time for me to rethink where this site is going, but I hope that my readers will continue to enjoy the results. And with that, I'd like to end the conversation. I don't want to get involved in another depressing topic like this again."
Now, GameOnline was probably not the most up-and-up of sites when you think about it. Its owner, the now-in-custody Isao Tanaka, used to run the game section of now-defunct portal site Gaburi. GameOnline went up almost immediately after Gaburi closed, taking the foundation of its design along with it, as well as all of Isao's game-industry connections. Companies probably didn't like his insider connections and lack of accountability. There are reports that he was also breaking NDAs. Companies in Japan don't like personal websites to have too much power because the content of such sites are too far beyond their control for their tastes. One of the good things about a "professional" site is that it has power over the behavior of its staff, and that's precisely why said staff is able to work with game companies and receive screens, advance information and so forth. Isao was using that information without permission -- in the copyright definition of permission, yes, but also in the unwritten rules of the local "scene", and he really should've listened to the warning mails he undoubtedly received from companies before the arrest.
However, the chilling effect GameOnline has had on Japan game sites is devastating. The KID site is down, yes, but game sites of nearly every kind -- strategy sites, fan sites, company-history sites -- are also gone, and I'm now on a mad dash to mirror all the places I can remember the URLs of to my hard drive. It'll probably be several years before game sites in Japan are restored to their original condition. The bar of self-governance has been raised a fair bit, to a point somewhere above the broadest interpretation of current laws. There's not much that can be done about that -- copyright has become easily breakable now that publishing is so simple, and it's only human not to be caught in some unseen trap or another.
Back when I was studying abroad in Japan, about five years ago, I noticed that TV news programs always mosaiced out the shelves and magazine racks of bookstores whenever they had a shot of one onscreen. I thought that was extremely weird, so I did some research to find out why things were like this, and unlike most other Japan-related questions on my mind ("Why are the bike brakes so squeaky?"), I actually found an answer. As it turns out, Johnny & Associates, the talent agency that handles SMAP, Tokio, V6 and lots of other music groups, won a case against some net site that posted up pics of SMAP members. Johnny runs a tight ship, and his company stipulates that images of their talent cannot be used without an official contract from them, and so the TV stations decided that no printed matter could be shown on the air without express permission. After a while, though, the stations apparently calmed down, and now pretty much anything that doesn't have a Johnny talent on it is deemed OK for on-the-air purposes. The concept of "fair use" does not enter into Japanese copyright laws, so such a state is completely possible. What's worse, it makes things extremely vague and dangerous for people like Isao: without fair use, there are no media rights nor any system to keep game publishers from hauling them off to court at a moment's notice. That's why you have the weird compromise the TV stations have figured out with themselves on printed matter. Right now, however, there's no guideline for what is safe among amateur game-site admins in Japan. Can I post pics? If I can post pics, then should I stop at the title screen, or are in-game shots okay? Is writing a review okay? Hell, am I allowed to say anything about a game without getting permission from the publishers, as if I was Prima and I wanted to write an official startegy guide or something? It's that sort of condition right now, and I'm sure it'll stabilize before too long, but more saddening is the fact that this will stifle originality and make "pro" Japanese sites even more boring and insipid than they were before.
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