Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Then, the effects of the French and German court rulings on VC investment on cloud
computing firms in these countries were separately analyzed. The results of those
analyses suggest that decisions around the scope of copyrights can have economically
and statistically significant impacts on investment and innovation.
3
The Cloud Computing Services and Limitations on the
Reproduction for Private Use
The Japanese Copyright Act has explicitly enumerated limitation provisions
depending on the kind of bundle rights and relevant exploitations. One such limitation
is the private use limitation for the reproduction right,
Article 30 (Reproduction for private use): (1) Except in the cases listed below,
it shall be permissible for the user of a work that is the subject of a copyright
(below in this Subsection simply referred to as a "work") to reproduce the work
for his personal use or family use or other equivalent uses within a limited
scope (hereinafter referred to as "private use"): … [12].
Customers of certain cloud services may wonder whether they are liable for
infringement of reproduction rights concerning the use which falls within a “private
use”. Even if each customer is exempted from liability based on such a limitation, a
service provider may nonetheless still be liable for the customer's exploitation of the
particular copyrighted works under what is known as the “Karaoke theory” or a
variation thereof [17].
3.1
The Karaoke Theory
The “Karaoke theory” is now prevalent among copyright infringement cases in Japan.
The Karaoke theory was originally adopted to decide whether a manager of a
traditional Japanese Karaoke bar was liable for infringement of the “right of
performance” on copyrighted musical works when it provided occasions for its
customers to perform such works. Article 22 of the Copyright Act states that the
author shall have the exclusive right to perform his work publicly ("publicly" means
for the purpose of making a work seen or heard directly by the public) [12]. Copyright
holders want to charge the manager of such a Karaoke bar instead of an individual
customer [17]. Beyond the Karaoke bar case, the Karaoke theory has been more
broadly applied to other kinds of services when the provider is merely an indirect
practitioner, but the customers directly exploit particular copyrighted works (the so-
called “variation” of the Karaoke theory). When the Karaoke theory is applied to the
cloud computing services, careful consideration is needed to determine whether or not
the reproduction of copyrighted material provided falls within the description of
“private use”.
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