翻訳コラム

久しぶりに自炊のニュースがあったので、自炊の判例を調べました。平成26年10月の知財高裁の判例でも自炊業者は違法であると判断されていました。書籍をスキャンして電子化し、形式を変換してサーバにアップロードし、これをユーザがダウンロードするか、これを収録したDVDをユーザに配送するようにした自炊業者の行為はやはり違法でした。
この業務用のサーバも自炊業者の事務所内に置かれているし、この業務をインターネットで宣伝して、対価もユーザからもらっているため、この複製行為の主体は自炊業者であるという判断です。そしてユーザの「手足」としての複製ではないということです。ユーザの「手足」であれば「私的使用」の目的があり、著作権非侵害の可能性が出てきます。
この判例で画期的なのは、自炊業者が複製の主体であるため、自炊業者の行為が「私的使用」であるかどうかが判断されている点です。私的使用であれば著作権侵害ではないからです。私的使用といえるためには、「個人的又は家庭的」であること、私的使用する者が複製することという2つの要件が挙げられており、この事件の自炊業者はこの2つの要件を満たしていません。
自炊業者がユーザの私的使用の手伝いをしているか、ではなく、自炊業者自身が私的使用の目的があるかを判断した点が画期的です(平成25(ネ)10089号)。

After a long interval, the appearance of certain news about acts of “jisui" (acts of scanning a book or magazine so as to create an e-book for oneself) peaked my interests so I searched for any recent court decisions related to it. In a court decision dated to October 26 2014, the Intellectual Property High Court determined that acts of jisui were copyright infringement. Companies which committed acts of jisui by either converting books into electronic form so that they could upload them online so that others could download them, or companies who recorded such information to DVDs to distribute them to others, were all committing illegal acts.
The servers used by such businesses were also located in these companies, and they advertised their services, which were mainly jisui based, online to received money in order to perform these services that are defined as copyright infringement acts. As such, though these jisui committing companies acted on behalf of their customers to commit this crime, the customers themselves were considered innocent. Since these companies were acting on behalf of their customers, the act was considered as “private use" and therefor it was possible to consider the customers as innocent from copyright infringement.
The reason this court case was so ground breaking was because the definition of private use acts had to be challenged to determine if these jisui committing companies were infringing copyrights or not. This is because an act of reproduction which is done for private use is not considered to be copyright infringement. In order for an act to be considered as private use, two requirements must be met: an act of private use reproduction must be done by either the individual or by the individuals' family. These jisui committing companies in this case did not satisfy these two requirements.
Despite the private use rights of their customers, this court decision judged whether the jisui committing companies themselves were operating under private use or not, which is why the case is so groundbreaking (Heisei 25 (2014) (ne) No. 10089).