One Japanese morning news channel just had a short report on what they called "digital shoplifting".
There seems to be a new practice spreading of using a mobile phone to take digital photographs of single book pages in book stores.
The news commentary said that was a crime. Digital shoplifting. The same as tearing the page out of the book and taking it with you. And anyone doing that would be illegally trespassing into the book store.
As a question of copyright law, that act might be legal under Article 30 of the Japanese copyright law, as a reproduction for private use.
That Article however only applies to private copies by a "user" of a work. One could probably argue that someone looking at a book in a store is not a "user" until he buys it.
This point is one of the reasons the German upper house (Bundesrat) did not approve of the draft law to transform the European copyright directive. The upper house says that copies for private use should be legal only if the work copied has been purchased legally.
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at July 1, 2003 11:27 AM | TrackBackVery interesting. It brings to mind some well-documented French concerns surrounding the legality of tourists (especially Japanese) taking pictures of Haute Couture vitrines at the Avenue Montaigne, then trying to reproduce the exhibited outfits and sell them at cheaper prices.
Posted by: miladus on July 2, 2003 02:06 AM