In an operation starting Tuesday this week and ending Friday, police targeted 50 locations around Japan and ultimately arrested a total of 18 individuals.

The ACA, an organization made up of various trade groups including the Recording Industry Association of Japan, International Motion Picture Copyright Association and various other film, music and software entities, said the raids followed a similar but smaller operation in November last year. In that action, 11 people were arrested and according to ACA, all have been convicted.

As appears to be customary in these cases, the RIAJ – the Japanese equivalent of the RIAA – has taken the step of publishing a list of the ages, sex, locations, occupations and copyright works said to have been shared by the 18 individuals.

They range from a 25 year-old taxi driver from Tokyo sharing Cross Game, Dragon Ball Kai, Evangelion, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Gundam 00 Second Season, to a 58 year-old construction worker sharing IBM Homepage Builder 12 and input method editor ATOK 2010.

What is striking about the arrests is that none of the accused appear to be heavy uploaders – the ‘worst’ pair appear to have uploaded 6 games, 2 comics and 4 music tracks between them.

While downloading in Japan was previously permitted for personal use, both up and downloading of copyright works are now expressly illegal.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The site owner wrote the RIAJ a detailed description of how BitTorrent actually works, that they have no control over the content that’s added, and that the files are not hosted on their servers.

The admin told the RIAJ that he was wiling to cooperate, and take down the torrents in question. Most other BitTorrent sites have a similar policy, and take down torrents if they’re asked to by the copyright holders.

Surprisingly enough the RIAJ was very pleased with the response from fenopy’s admin. The RIAJ thanked the admin for his swift and polite response, and said it was all good.

The RIAJ even told the admin that they were “friends” now, and that they would contact the him directly in the future, instead of sending threat mails to their ISP.

They all lived happily ever after.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.