Japan makes historic arrests targeting ‘spoiler site’ covering Godzilla, anime

Anime piracy has been a major point of contention in the middle for quite some time. There have been countless websites and portals that have been taken to task by government organizations for sharing leaked episodes and movies of the anime variety. In a wild new story, it appears the Japanese government is cracking down on another kind of leak, spoilers. In a shocking new statement, Japanese officials have confirmed that three men have been arrested for sharing spoilers online, and you might be shocked to learn why it’s a big faux pas in Japan.

To begin with, the Japan Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA) shared the news that Miyagi Prefectural Police and Tome Police Station arrested three men who were damaging some important properties. One of them was the detailed descriptions of Godzilla Minus One before the film’s release earlier this year and the other was Master IIIisekai series that sees a player placed in the role of his video game character, a wizard with a giant skeleton. While piracy has always been a problem, the idea that transcribing spoilers into text would be against the law may come as a shock to many anime fans. Fortunately, CODA broke down the events that took place.

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Are anime spoilers illegal?

Here is CODA’s official statement regarding the events: “On October 29, 2024, Miyagi Prefectural Police Headquarters and Tome Police Station arrested three men, including a company manager who lives in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, on suspicion of violating the law copyright for transcriptions. the entire story of a film or other copyrighted work without the rights holder’s permission by creating an article with similar images and posting it on a website operated by their company. It is the first time in Japan that operators of a website that extracts text from movies and other works have been arrested.”

The breakdown continues: “Between January 2023 and February 2024, the men transcribed detailed information about the entire story, including character names, lines, actions, scenes and scene developments depicted in the movie ‘Godzilla 1.0’ and another movie, whose copyright is owned by Toho Co., Ltd. and others and the anime “Overlord III”, the copyright of which is owned by KADOKAWA Corporation and others, without permission from the rights holders, and articles posted with related images on a website for to unfairly obtain advertising revenue.”

The explanation

The Overseas Content Distribution Association explained why spoilers are in hot water: “There have been many sites that extract text from movies and other content and are considered problematic as so-called ‘spoiler sites.’ These actions tend to be considered less of an infringement than pirated sites or illegal uploads that upload the content itself, but they are clear copyright violations that go beyond the scope of the citation and are serious crimes. The problem with sites that extract text from movies and other content is that they reduce people’s willingness to pay a fair price for the content, which can lead to people not seeing the official full-length movies, causing great damage to rights holders. Additionally, the act of infringing content that creators have spent time, effort and money creating and unfairly gaining advertising revenue is extremely malicious and should never be tolerated.”

Want to learn more about what is and isn’t illegal in the world of anime? Follow along with Team Anime on ComicBook.com for the latest updates on all things anime, and hit me up directly @EVComedy to talk all things comics and anime.

Through CODA