A fifty-three-year-old Japanese YouTuber has been sentenced to prison (although this sentence was initially suspended) and a fine for posting an endgame on Google’s popular online video platform.
According to the newspaper AsahiShinodo Yoshida was convicted of violating Japanese copyright law by distributing unauthorized videos.
Specifically, Yoshida was prosecuted for posting three videos to YouTube between September 2019 and May 2022, including a video from the 2011 visual novel Steins;Gate: My Darling’s Embrace and an edited video from an animated film.
The prosecution’s main argument was that the Steins;Gate video showed the endgame. Since visual novels are a type of video game that are less interactive than others, the accusation stated that watching a YouTube video is a similar experience to playing the game itself, and because of this Spike Chunsoft would lose sales and corresponding revenue from the games. Users who decided to watch these videos instead of purchasing the game.
That’s why they described Yoshida’s actions as “harmful actions that harm content creation efforts,” discouraging the purchase of the products.
For its part, the defense said that these actions were not “particularly malicious” and asked for the sentence to be suspended.
The judge ultimately imposed a sentence that was somewhere in the middle. Yoshida was sentenced to a fine of 1 million yen (about $6,780) and two years in prison, although the latter was suspended for five years. This means that Yoshida will not have to go to prison if he does not commit a crime again within that five-year period.
According to Asahi, Shinodo Yoshida is the first person to be convicted in Japan for violating copyright law by distributing video game clips. Although he won’t go to prison initially, this sets a very dangerous legal precedent, as other companies could make similar arguments to prevent videos of their games from being posted online.
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