Aozora Bunko (, literally the "Blue Sky Library", also known as the "Open Air Library") is a

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

digital library A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital ...

. This online collection encompasses several thousands of works of Japanese-language fiction and non-fiction. These include out-of-

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...

books or works that the authors wish to make freely available. Since its inception in 1997, ''Aozora Bunko'' has been both the compiler and publisher of an evolving online catalog.

Intute Intute was a free Web service aimed at students, teachers, and researchers in UK further education and higher education. Intute provided access to online resources, via a large database of resources. Each resource was reviewed by an academic sp ...

Intute web site, ''Aozora Bunko'' project description
/ref> In 2006, ''Aozora Bunko'' organized to add a role as a public policy advocate to protect its current and anticipated catalog of freely accessible

e-book An ebook (short for electronic book), also known as an e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. A ...

History and operation

''Aozora Bunko'' was created on the Internet in 1997 to provide broadly available, free access to Japanese literary works whose copyrights had expired. The driving force behind the project was Michio Tomita ( :ja:富田倫生, 1952–2013), who was motivated by the belief that people with a common interest should cooperate with each other. In

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the n ...

, ''Aozora Bunko'' is considered similar to

Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital libr ...

.Tamura, Aya
"Novelists, others want copyright protection extended"
''

The Japan Times Online ''The Japan Times'' is Japan's largest and oldest English-language daily newspaper. It is published by , a subsidiary of News2u Holdings, Inc.. It is headquartered in the in Kioicho, Chiyoda, Tokyo. History ''The Japan Times'' was launched by ...

.'' September 30, 2006. Most of the texts provided are

Japanese literature Japanese literature throughout most of its history has been influenced by cultural contact with neighboring Asian literatures, most notably China and its literature. Early texts were often written in pure Classical Chinese or , a Chinese-Japanes ...

, and some translations from

English literature English literature is literature written in the English language from United Kingdom, its crown dependencies, the Republic of Ireland, the United States, and the countries of the former British Empire. ''The Encyclopaedia Britannica'' defines E ...

. The resources are searchable by category, author, or title; and there is a considerable amount of support in how to use the database in the form of detailed explanations. The files can be downloaded in PDF format or simply viewed in HTML format. After the passing of Tomita in 2013, the was established independently to assist funding and operations for ''Aozora Bunko''. ''Aozora Bunko'' currently includes more than 15,100 works .

Public-policy advocacy organization

''Aozora Bunko'' joined with others in organizing to oppose changes in

Japanese copyright law consist of two parts: "Author's Rights" and "Neighbouring Rights". As such, "copyright" is a convenient collective term rather than a single concept in Japan. Japan was a party to the original Berne convention in 1899, so its copyright law is in sy ...

. That opposition has led to encouraging Japanese citizens to submit letters and petitions to the Japanese

Cultural Affairs Agency The is a special body of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). It was set up in 1968 to promote Japanese arts and culture. The agency's budget for FY 2018 rose to ¥107.7 billion. Overview The a ...

and to members of the

Diet Diet may refer to: Food * Diet (nutrition), the sum of the food consumed by an organism or group * Dieting, the deliberate selection of food to control body weight or nutrient intake ** Diet food, foods that aid in creating a diet for weight loss ...

Japan and other countries accepted the terms of the

Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, usually known as the Berne Convention, was an international assembly held in 1886 in the Swiss city of Bern by ten European countries with the goal to agree on a set of leg ...

, an 1886 international agreement about common copyright policies. ''Aozora Bunko'' adopted an advocacy role in favor of continuing with a ''status quo'' of laws that do not go beyond the minimum copyright terms of the Berne Convention have copyrights that run for the lifetime of the author plus 50 years as preferable to changes proposed by a number of powerful forces. The evolution of ''Aozora Bunko'' from a digital library to a public-policy advocacy organization is an unintended consequence which developed only after the perceived threat to the Aozora Bunko catalog and mission became otherwise unavoidable.

Problems

''Aozora Bunko'' pointed that extension of the copyright term had been influenced from the document, "The U.S.-Japan Regulatory Reform and Competition Policy Initiative." Through these annual reports, The U.S. Government was requiring that the protected period of copyright should be extended to the Japanese government: 70 years after one's death for a work by an individual, and 95 years after publication for a work by a corporation. In response, the Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan has expressed that a conclusion was obtained at the Council for Cultural Affairs copyright subcommittee by the end of 2007. If the legal revision which extends a protected period will be actually carried out, ''Aozora Bunko'' would be forced not to publish books which have already and almost been published because of the 20 years' extension of protection of copyright. Therefore, ''Aozora Bunko'' released the counter declaration against enforcement of the revised law on 1 January 2005; they started to collect the signatures for a petition on 1 January 2007. Due to the regime change in 2009 in Japan, Japanese government stopped to receive these reports from the U.S. government. ''Aozora Bunko'' does not show any responses toward that and their petition calling for opposition against the extension of copyright term stopped from the modification of October 2008. Instead of the document, the website of embassy of the United States inserted the "UNITED STATES-JAPAN ECONOMIC HARMONIZATION INITIATIVE" in February 2011. In the document, The U.S. government promoted the extension of copyright law for protection of intellectual property rights toward Japanese government so that it was "in line with emerging global trends, including those of its OECD counterparts and major trading partners." On 30 December 2018, Japan did extend the period to 70 years, which was a requirement stemming from the EU–Japan Economic Partnership Agreement.

Notes

References

* Bovens, Andreas (2005)
"Closed Architectures for Content Distribution,"
''Japan Media Review'' (University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication)

* Donovan, Maureen H. (2006)
''Accessing Japanese Digital Libraries: Three Case Studies.''
Berlin:

Springer Springer or springers may refer to: Publishers * Springer Science+Business Media, aka Springer International Publishing, a worldwide publishing group founded in 1842 in Germany formerly known as Springer-Verlag. ** Springer Nature, a multinationa ...

. . * Lessig, Lawrence (2004)
''Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.''
New York:

Penguin Press Penguin Group is a British trade book publisher and part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. The new company was created by a merger that was finalised on 1 July 2013, with Bertelsmann initiall ...

. , (cloth) * Tamura, Aya
"Novelists, others want copyright protection extended"
''

.'' September 30, 2006. * Tomita, Michio
"Enable Library, ''Aozora Bunko'' as an 'Enable Library'"
''Gendai no Toshokan.'' Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 176–181 (1999). * Tomita, Michio
"Dream of perpetual Aozora Bunko, a private electronic library,"
''Art research'' (Ritsumeikan University). Vol.2, pp. 49–56 (2001). * Yamamoto, Shuichiro
"What Is Knowledge That Generates Value?" Science Links Japan web site
(2008).

External links