File sharing File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include r ...

in Japan is notable for both its size and sophistication.Shirley Gene Field (2010)
"Internet Piracy in Japan: Lessig’s Modalities of Constraint and Japanese File Sharing".

University of Texas The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

Masters Thesis. The

Recording Industry Association of Japan The is an industry trade group composed of Japanese corporations involved in the music industry. It was founded in 1942 as the Japan Phonogram Record Cultural Association, and adopted its current name in 1969. The RIAJ's activities include p ...

has used a 2010 study to suggest that illegal downloads (which have been illegal since 2010) outnumber legal ones 10:1."Japan introduces piracy penalties for illegal downloads".
''

BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...

''. In 2012, a law was passed that would invoke penalties for accessing pirated music or movies. In 2020, the National Diet passed a law expanding the penalties to the download of manga, academic texts, and magazines, as well as banning "leech websites" that provide users hyperlinks to download torrent files of pirated materials, pasting hyperlinks of illegal websites on an anonymous message board, or providing "leech apps" for similar purposes. The part on the expansion of penalties took effect on 1 January 2021, and the part on regulation of leech websites and apps took effect on 1 October 2021. The new legislation exempts "minor offenses" and "special instances" (such as unintentional instances in screenshots, parodies and derivative works, and other small instances, such as downloading only a few frames from a comic book of several dozen pages, or a couple of pages from a novel containing several hundred pages) from being categorized as illicit due to concerns it would clash with the right to freedom of speech. Penalties for operating or establishing leech sites will be set at up to five years in jail or a maximum fine of 5 million yen. The law focuses mainly on content downloaded to devices, so a loophole may exist in terms of livestreaming such content. Unlike most other countries, filesharing copyrighted content is not just a civil offense, but a criminal one, with penalties of up to ten years for uploading and penalties of up to two years for downloading. There is also a high level of

Internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privatel ...

cooperation. This may be one of the reasons that anonymous networks such as

Winny Winny (also known as WinNY) is a Japanese peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing program developed by Isamu Kaneko, a research assistant at the University of Tokyo in 2002. Like Freenet, a user must add an encrypted node list in order to connect to oth ...

Perfect Dark ''Perfect Dark'' is a first-person shooter developed and published by Rare for the Nintendo 64 video game console in 2000. The first game of the '' Perfect Dark'' series, it follows Joanna Dark, an agent of the Carrington Institute research ...

and Share are thought to be popular compared to public networks such as Bittorrent,

WinMX WinMX (Windows Music Exchange) is a freeware peer-to-peer file sharing program authored in 2000 by Kevin Hearn (president of Frontcode Technologies) in Windsor, Ontario (Canada). According to one study, it was the number one source for online mus ...

Gnutella Gnutella is a peer-to-peer network protocol. Founded in 2000, it was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model. In June 2005, Gnutella's population was 1.81 million computer ...

(Cabos) and OpenNap (Utatane).

History

2000

Kevin Hearn and Frontcode Technologies release

, one of the first peer-to-peer file sharing clients to provide

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

support for Japanese characters.

2002

The

releases its first report on file sharing. 84% of those who had used file sharing software reported using

mainly to share

J-pop J-pop ( ja, ジェイポップ, ''jeipoppu''; often stylized as J-POP; an abbreviated form of "Japanese popular music"), natively also known simply as , is the name for a form of popular music that entered the musical mainstream of Japan in the ...

mp3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Orig ...

's.https://www.riaj.or.jp/f/pdf/report/file_exc/file_exchange.pdf About half of these people had used

Napster Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was founded by Sh ...

in the past, but its use was dropping off. Isamu Kaneko of

Tokyo University , abbreviated as or UTokyo, is a public research university located in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Established in 1877, the university was the first Imperial University and is currently a Top Type university of the Top Global University Project by ...

releases

, the first Japanese file sharing client, based on the

anonymous P2P An anonymous P2P communication system is a peer-to-peer distributed application in which the nodes, which are used to share resources, or participants are anonymous or pseudonymous. Anonymity of participants is usually achieved by special routin ...

distributed data store A distributed data store is a computer network where information is stored on more than one node, often in a replicated fashion. It is usually specifically used to refer to either a distributed database where users store information on a ''numb ...

and

node In general, a node is a localized swelling (a "knot") or a point of intersection (a vertex). Node may refer to: In mathematics * Vertex (graph theory), a vertex in a mathematical graph * Vertex (geometry), a point where two or more curves, line ...

model of

Freenet Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to keep and deliver information, and has a suite of free software for publishing and communicating on the Web ...

2003

'#Rufu' releases Utatane, a Japanese client for connecting to the OpenNap network.　August 8, the Antinny virus is first reported. Users of Winny unknowingly install it on their computers, and then the virus uses Winny to upload their personal information to the network.

2004

On May 10, Isamu Kaneko is arrested on suspicion of encouraging copyright infringement through his posts to

2channel , also known as 2ch, Channel 2, and sometimes retrospectively as 2ch.net, was an anonymous Japanese textboard founded in 1999 by Hiroyuki Nishimura. Described in 2007 as "Japan's most popular online community", the site had a level of infl ...

regarding

. Fairu Souko (ファイル倉庫 File warehouse) releases Share, based on Winny, but making it easier to find files. Cabos is also released, a Japanese client for connecting to the

network.

2005

February 14,

Chad Hurley Chad Meredith Hurley (born January 24, 1977) is an American webmaster and businessman who serves as the advisor and former chief executive officer (CEO) of YouTube. He also co-founded MixBit. In June 2006, he was voted 28th on Business 2.0's "5 ...

Steve Chen Steve Chen (; born August 25, 1978) is a Taiwanese-American Internet entrepreneur who is one of the co-founders and previous chief technology officer of the video-sharing website YouTube. After having co-founded the company AVOS Systems, Inc ...

and

Jawed Karim Jawed Karim (বাংলাঃ জাওয়াদ করিম) (born October 28, 1979) is an American software engineer and Internet entrepreneur of Bangladeshi and German descent. He is a co-founder of YouTube and the first person to u ...

found

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second most ...

, an American video sharing site, that becomes popular in Japan and around the world. The website

Nyaa Torrents Nyaa Torrents (named for the Japanese onomatopoeia for a cat's meow) is a BitTorrent website focused on East Asian (Japanese, Chinese, and Korean) media. It is one of the largest public anime-dedicated torrent indexes. History In 2011, so ...

comes online providing links to torrents for Japanese anime and other East Asian files.

2006

Kaicho (会長, association president) releases

, a further development in the Winny/Share line. The Kyoto court finds Kaneko guilty, and requires that he pay a 1.5 million yen fine. He files an appeal the same day. December 12, Nobuo Kawakami founds Niconico, a Japanese video sharing site, initially relying heavily on

content.

2007

On the RIAJ survey, Japanese users indicated

and

Limewire LimeWire was a free peer-to-peer file sharing client for Windows, MacOS, Linux and Solaris. Created by Mark Gorton in 2000, it was most prominently a tool used for the download and distribution of pirated materials, particularly pirated musi ...

as more popular than

for the first time. The RIAJ's node count shows

having 264 000 people connected followed by Share with 201 000. In March, the company Retina released Sharebot, a program designed to detect the IP address of users of Share who are uploading files. Developers respond by releasing DiffusionProClone, a Share plugin designed to block all instances of Sharebot from connecting to a user's Share.

2008

The RIAJ's node count has Share rising to 209 000 connections, and

falling to 181 000. U.S.-based Japanese language web host Fc2.com introduces a video sharing service similar to

. Kazushi Hirata is arrested, and found guilty receiving a 2-year jail sentence suspended for 3 years for uploading a pre-release movie to Winny.

2009

In 2009 the copyright law was amended to specifically single out the uploading of copyrighted material for special penalties of up to ten years in prison. October 8, the Osaka High Court finds Kaneko not guilty. The prosecutors appeal the verdict to the Supreme Court.

2010

In 2010 the copyright law was amended to criminalize downloading copyrighted material. The Japanese press reported the first incident of a man being arrested for uploading a TV program he'd recorded to Bittorrent.

2011

December 20, the Supreme Court finds Kaneko not guilty.

2012

The criminal penalties for downloading material were strengthened. The maximum penalty was set as 2 years in prison and a two million

yen The is the official currency of Japan. It is the third-most traded currency in the foreign exchange market, after the United States dollar (US$) and the euro. It is also widely used as a third reserve currency after the US dollar and the ...

fine.

2013

Palo Alto Networks published a report estimating that Bittorrent consumed the most bandwidth in Japan (6.5 trillion bits) followed by

(1.8 trillion) and Share (1.06 trillion) with

and

further behind.

NHK , also known as NHK, is a Japanese public broadcaster. NHK, which has always been known by this romanized initialism in Japanese, is a statutory corporation funded by viewers' payments of a television license fee. NHK operates two terrestri ...

reports 24 people being arrested for uploading anime to Share, 2 arrested for uploading to Perfect Dark and one arrested for uploading to an unnamed file host.

2014

Japan's Association for Copyright of Computer Software reported that overall use of file sharing had dropped markedly since 2008 with Share still the most popular file sharing program with 44 000 nodes, followed by

(24 000) and

(12 000). Netagent also noted a decline, but had Winny with 51 000 nodes, Perfect Dark with 49 000, and Share with 39 000.

2016

Japan's National Police Agency reports arresting 44 people for copyright infringement carried out through the use of file sharing software. The announcement notes that downloading is now illegal in Japan.

2018

Netagent reported a further decline with

having the largest number of nodes 45 000 followed by Perfect Dark with 30 000 followed by Share with 10 000.

2019

A Korean man living in Japan is arrested for uploading an anime that was available for free on YouTube to the Bittorrent network.