International Law

Search Engine Exception

By Karl-Friedrich Lenz

As I reported earlier, there have been discussions about introducing an exception for search engines into Japanese copyright.

A draft law has been posted at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

Unfortunately, it is in a form unsuited for reading online. The draft is offered as a PDF file in a goofy format that basically makes it impossible to read the pages without printing them out.

So, as a service to people interested in this draft, I have copied the draft below, in original Japanese language, but in simple Html format. I have done this by rewriting the text, so there might be some mistakes.

I will discuss this proposal in another post and for now only comment on the editing style, which as most modern Japanese laws is horrible.

The draft consists of only two sentences. The first sentence stretches endlessly on and on, with several definitions and other stuff clearly belonging in a separate sentence or paragraph interrupting the flow inserted into brackets.

Maybe the authors of that text hoped that with this kind of writing foreigners would be unable to read it, so Japan could avoid a TRIPS challenge for this wholesale abdication of copyright.

Then again, this is just standard procedure in modern Japanese legislation. Nobody seems to care about making the text easy to read anymore.

For reference, find the Html version of the draft below.

“?47???

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Full post as published by Lenz Blog on June 02, 2009 (boomark / email).