Toho Co. Ltd.
The internet can be a bit of a minefield for people who are trying to avoid being exposed to major plot points for movies and television shows before they have the chance to check them off their watchlist. One man in Japan made some serious bank with a website devoted to in-depth summaries filled with potential spoilers, and he’ll be serving more than a year in prison as a result.
The rise of the internet was a central aspect of the “Information Age,” which can still be used to refer to our current reality despite being a fairly archaic term. That moniker can be deployed to describe an era that was ushered in as early as the 1940s, but most people associate it with the nascent days of the World Wide Web, which allowed for the dissemination of, well, information at unprecedented speed.
Society is still grappling with the upsides and downsides of that particular development. The threat of being exposed to spoilers online may not be a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, it is nonetheless a point of contention for many people who’ve learned they need to tread carefully if they want to experience movies, TV shows, and other forms of entertainment with no prior knowledge of how things are going to unfold.
There are plenty of trolls who take pleasure in flocking to social media to attempt to ruin things for people who are trying to go in blind, as well as others who would argue they are providing a service for people who are curious about certain details but don’t want to spend more time or money than required to access them.
That includes one man in Japan who fell under that second umbrella, but he’s landed behind bars after a court ruled he’d gone too far.
The owner of a website devoted to spoilers was sentenced to a year and a half in prison over online summaries that contained too much detail
The internet is filled with anti-spoiler crusaders, but there are also plenty of users who go out of their way to use the technology at their disposal to willingly look them up.
It might sound crazy to cinema junkies or television buffs who can’t fathom the idea of purposefully “ruining” something for yourself, but some people don’t have an issue with doing exactly that in order to get some context for something that’s dominating the cultural conversation (like a crazy “twist” in a project they couldn’t care less about otherwise).
According to Tom’s Hardware, a 39-year-old Japanese man named Wataru Takeuchi operated a website that catered to those casuals by routinely publishing in-depth summaries of popular movies and television shows.
That included a recap of an episode of the anime series Overlord that came out in 2018 as well as a lengthy synopsis of the 2023 blockbuster Godzilla Minus One, which eventually drew the attention of Kadokawa and Toho, the studios that were respectively behind them.
The two corporations filed a lawsuit through the Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA) that argued the summaries violated a Japanese law that bans the creation of “a new work by making creative modifications to the original while preserving its essential characteristics.”
It argued the articles were essentially unauthorized adaptations of the projects they covered, pointing to “transcribed dialogue” and exhaustive detailing of plot beats as proof of copyright infringement. The companies asserted that people who read them would no longer feel the need to watch the projects in question, meaning they were robbed of potential revenue as a result.
It would be easier to get away with that kind of content in the United States under the fair use doctrine, but that legal principle does not apply in Japan.
The two parties also noted that Takeuchi (who was arrested with two other men in 2024) ran ads on the website that earned him 38 million yen (around $240,000) in 2023, and they recently received a favorable ruling when he was sentenced to a year and a half in prison along with a 1 million yen (~$6,300) fine over the articles.
Bummer.