Two Years for a Music Video
Japan passed a copyright enforcement law that took effect on the first of October 2012, and what it actually did—in plain language, stripped of all the legal phrasing—was make watching an unauthorized video on the internet a criminal act punishable by up to two years in prison. Not uploading. Not distributing. Watching. The logic runs like this: every video you stream is buffered to your device; buffering is technically downloading; downloading without authorization is now a crime. The Recording Industry Association of Japan pushed it through, and it passed.
I was in Tokyo when this happened. I’d been there about three months, long enough to feel settled but still attentive to what was strange. What struck me wasn’t the law itself—copyright maximalism had been accelerating for years—but how few people around me knew it had passed. Not tourists. Residents. I’d mention it and watch the arithmetic play out on their faces: confusion, then the slow realization of what it meant for things they did every day. The evening news wasn’t covering it. Instead there were car commercials, and a segment from a nuclear energy company about how safe everything was.
The people who knew were trying to organize, trying to activate anyone who’d listen, mostly hitting walls. There was a feeling of something already having happened, of a door closed before most people noticed it was open.
It didn’t affect me directly—I’m not a Japanese national, and I was going home eventually. But that kind of reasoning is exactly how these things spread. Rights holders observe what they can extract from one jurisdiction and file the same requests in three others. The entertainment industry has been running this play for decades: find a sympathetic legislature, push through something that would have seemed extreme ten years earlier, let the precedent normalize, repeat. What Japan approved was a version of what every equivalent industry body wanted everywhere else. The fact that you could technically go to prison for watching a fan-uploaded music video wasn’t a side effect—it was the point. You don’t need mass prosecutions when the possibility alone does the chilling.
Normally I’d say sign a petition, chain yourself to an embassy, do whatever it is people do. But this was already done. The only move left was preventing it from spreading—and that, in 2012, already felt like a race that had quietly started without anyone announcing the gun. I don’t have a resolution to offer. I didn’t then either. What I remember is standing in a convenience store in Shibuya listening to a song playing from a screen near the ceiling, and thinking: somewhere, in a room full of lawyers, someone is working on making exactly this moment illegal.