After the official accounts for Hatsune Miku and Project Sekai put out messaging along the lines of “please stop illegal uploads,” some overseas fans fired back with “there’s no lost sales, so it’s legal” — sparking a heated discussion on 5ch’s hardware/industry (Gehard) board. The thread noted that the same argument had come up before with Mangamura (a notorious manga piracy site) and with Demon Slayer (whose overseas streaming was delayed), and the two sides talked past each other: the “no harm, no foul” logic never lined up with the counterargument that “copyright holders have rights regardless of whether damage occurred,” leaving legal reasoning and emotional reasoning stuck in a standoff.
Yeah, honestly those "trillions of yen in damages" claims were way overblown.
If anything it's a cultural win, right? 😮
There are plenty of countries and companies out there paying big money just to spread their culture abroad, and yet… 🥺
Didn't that whole thing end up proving the overseas manga market was bigger than expected, which led to more official translations into other languages? The foreigners' logic here is kind of like using a fan-made Japanese localization mod for a PC game. Though companies like Square Enix deliberately strip out the Japanese version and sell it separately as a paid option, so I get why that feels like it's hurting business.
They're not even factoring in things like "Japanese fans would never pirate it anyway" or "companies worry that once it's already been uploaded, people might skip buying it." Zero consideration for any of that. Impressive, honestly.
Those guys can't even read Japanese — you'd just end up losing money on distribution costs.
They're just saying that since there's no official release being sold there to begin with, the claim "we lost money because of the illegal upload" doesn't hold up — that's all.
Proving there was "no damage" from an upload is a stretch to begin with — the moment it's made public to an unspecified number of people, that argument falls apart.
Damages aren't required as an element for illegal uploads to be pursued civilly or criminally.
Whether there's damage or not, only the copyright holder has the right to authorize use of the work.
Apparently there are Japanese people like this too — they just have zero sense that they're infringing on intellectual property.
The damages figure is calculated as "this is what we'd charge you if we were selling it to you," but their logic is "you won't sell it to me, so I'll count it as free," and "since it's free, stealing it is fine."
No, that's not right. You could just as easily say they *can't* distribute it officially *because* piracy is already so rampant — and defending piracy like this just pushes official releases further away.
There are plenty of idiots in the underground scene who just can't help insisting they're in the right. And when idiots like that get too loud, it just gets legislated into law, or server operators get pressured by the rights holders, and the whole thing gets clamped down anyway.
Idiots never think "the company's politely asking us to stop, so let's quietly keep going without making noise." Makes you wonder if they just want to pick a fight with the company, or feel superior to them.
Even if it's not logically correct, it's correct in principle, so what can you do — in reality, there's no actual damage.
It becomes impossible to distribute officially, so the damage is massive.
Is "the creator owns the rights to their own work" really such a difficult concept? lol
Overseas there's a ton of self-styled "Pirate Kings" running around — like, a hundred of them lol
Sponsored corporate tie-ins are done with the rights holder's permission, so legally that's completely different from distributing unauthorized pirated copies.
If you really think distributing pirated copies is "right," then go get permission from the company — and if they refuse, go fight it out in court over being denied permission.
You're doing it without permission because you know you'd lose in court, right? That's exactly how much your so-called "rightness" is worth.
Background and Key Issues
Copyright law grants copyright holders exclusive rights such as the right of reproduction and the right of public transmission, and unauthorized uploads can be subject to injunctions or criminal penalties as rights infringement regardless of whether actual damage occurred. Where the thread’s argument got tangled was in conflating “whether it’s illegal” with “whether damages would be awarded.” The claim of “no lost sales” may be a hurdle for a damages claim specifically, but it’s not a reason that makes the act of uploading itself legal. This same “no real harm” argument has surfaced before with Mangamura and with Demon Slayer (whose overseas streaming was delayed), and some in the thread saw this as simply a rehash of that same old debate.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Gehard board)) thread “Hatsune Miku Official: “Please Stop the Illegal Uploads!” → Overseas Fans: “It’s Legal Since There’s No Lost Sales” → Goes Viral“.
