To support existing punishments of up to 10 years in prison for uploaders, knowingly downloading copyright-infringing material became an offense carrying a potential two years in jail. While it was hoped that these measures would encourage consumers to do the right thing, today the problems persist.

As a result, this week the Japanese government will act in order to preserve what it sees as one of its greatest cultural exports.

Anime and manga are now consumed in countries right around the world and Japan sees this interest in Japanese culture as useful to its relationships abroad. However, with that popularity comes piracy, much of it facilitated by unlicensed overseas sites.

In the hope of remedying the situation overseas, this Friday will see the launch of a massive anti-piracy campaign aimed at making a huge dent in anime and manga piracy.

The government and 15 leading producers and distributors will begin contacting an estimated 580 “overseas pirate sites” with demands that they mass-delete infringing content. The sites are located in various regions, but there will be a particular focus on China.

Whether those sites will comply will remain to be seen, but should pirate content become harder to find the campaign wants to be able to capitalize on that opportunity. According to NHK, a new site will direct fans to legal copies of the 250 affected works at a flat price of a few hundred yen.

“We want to create a project so that anime fans overseas can enjoy Japanese content legally and without infringement worries while the profits are paid to anime production companies and publishers,” a Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry spokesman said.

It seems highly unlikely that overseas sites will comply fully with the requests of the Japanese. However, by attempting to serve the overseas markets with legal content it will at least make it easier for foreigners to open their wallets, should they feel inclined to do so.

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

The 25 year-old from Ashiyashi City, Hyogo, was detained April 4th on accusations that he uploaded anime and manga without the copyright holders’ permission.

According to the police, the unemployed man uploaded the 50th episode of Sunrise’s Turn A Gundam television series in February, and went on to upload 28,000 files from 300 different animated and comic titles.

He did this, say the police, to become famous.

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

While there are ultra-aggressive approaches – such as the pay-up-or-else schemes flooding Europe and the United States – occasionally individuals come up with more creative approach worthy of attention.

One such individual is manga creator Ken Akamatsu, who today announced that he will start an ambitious scheme to monetize illicit copies of out-of-print manga currently residing in huge volumes on file-sharing networks.

Akamatsu will launch the “Illegal Manga File Purification Project” tomorrow via his J-Comi site. While noting that all fans have obtained illicit out-of-print manga via file-sharing networks “at least once”, Akamatsu is offering to ‘purify’ these files so that the creators can be paid for their work and subsequent downloaders can do so legally. According to AnimeNewsNetwork, the scheme will work as follows.

Manga fans with illicit files on their hard drive will be asked to upload them (or links to them on file-sharing networks) to the J-Comi site. Whilst keeping uploader identities private, J-Comi will contact the original creators of the files and obtain permission to monetize the content.

Once they have agreement, J-Comi will bundle advertising into the manga releases and reintroduce them back onto file-sharing networks. For this service there will be no charge and the original creators will receive 100% of the advertising revenue.

If agreement with the creators cannot be reached “the files will be abandoned and the files will continue to drift through hell [file-sharing networks]. Perhaps forever…,” Akamatsu predicts.

While this attempt at returning some revenue to the creators of these files is to be applauded, Ken Akamatsu could find himself an extremely busy man indeed, and maybe one with a rather large headache. Nevertheless, we wish him good luck for trying something positive. It has to be better than the alternative.

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