GMA reports that Japan's Bureau of Immigration (BI) has arrested a fugitive who is said to be one on Japan's "most wanted" list - for copyright infringement. the BI press release says that Romi Hoshino alias Zakay Romi, a Japanese-German-Israeli fugitive, was arrested at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal 3. The BI said Hoshino, 28, manages "Manga-Mura," allegedly an illegal viewing website of Japanese comics or graphic novels, popularly known as manga, that operated from January 2016 to April 2018. n what is said to be the worst violation of Japan's copyright law, Manga-Mura's operation allegedly cost 320 billion yen or US$2.9 billion in damages, the Bureau reported, citing Japanese authorities.
BoingBoing reports that attorney John Steele, one of the Prenda law copyright 'trolls', has been sentenced to 5 years in prison. Last month, Paul Hansmeier was sentenced to 14 years in prison and ordered to pay $1.5m in restitution for his role in the firm that BoingBong says "used a mix of entrapment, blackmail, identity theft, intimidation and fraud to extort millions from its victims by threatening to drag them into court for alleged infringement of copyright in eye-watering pornography". Steele cooperated with authorities, while Hansmeier fought the system for longer before entering a plea. Like Hansmeier, Steele has to pay $1.5m in restitution. Both men have also been disbarred. Hansmeier is appealing both the conviction and the sentence. In August 2015 a third Prenda law attorney, Paul Duffy, died. Along with Steele and Hansmeier, Judicial sanctions had been upheld against him by the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit for engaging in “abusive litigation” and failing to pay attorney's fees in a porn-downloading lawsuit. In June that year US District Judge David Herndon ruled that Steele and Duffy had "engaged in unreasonable, willful obstruction of discovery in bad faith" in its case.
And whilst on the fruity topic of trolls, The Electonic Frontiers Foundation has warned that the new Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (CASE) Act would "supercharge" a “copyright troll” industry. IPPro reports that The CASE Act aims to make it easier for independent creators to better defend their IP from theft, and was proposed in May by Democrat congressman Hakeem Jeffries and Republican Doug Collins - and it has had wide support from the creative industries, in particular photographers and songwriters, musicians and artists. But the EFF argues that the bill would increase the number of trolls filing “many ‘small claims’ on as many internet users as possible in order to make money through the bill’s statutory damages provisions”. Under the bill, the US Copyright Office would gain a Copyright Claims Board, which would reduce costs and easing the burden for creators defending their intellectual property. The legislation would allow the Copyright Office to create a determination process for claims seeking up to $5,000 in damages which the EFF suggest is a "most trivial nod towards due process”. There again, many in the creative sector argue that the CASE Act "addresses a decades-old inequity in America's copyright system: a copyright system that all too often denies individual creators and small businesses a viable means of protecting their creative efforts. When it passes, the bill will give smaller individual creators the same kind of protections that larger scale creators have enjoyed for years."
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH5ooKWYRmuVJrpeibb1wR9BF6A95Ix9Sj-nri7QE6Aei1PSgbDu3LVJHxDHQyUN34o-LVo6pW2OAzUxX9a1cIemDLluEc7J5iRW-6E5qN1IqmVJ9pbrKDt6etpxTvX2-5ulYD4oTlyso/s1600/youtube-logo.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment