A 39-year-old website administrator located in Tokyo, Japan was recently charged with violating the Copyright Act for posting “spoiler articles” containing written summaries of movie and anime plots. As reported by Asahi Shimbun, on April 16, the Tokyo District Court sentenced the man to one year and six months of prison with a suspended sentence of 4 years, and a penalty of 1 million yen (approximately $6.3k USD). The criminal complaint against the website administrator was filed back in late 2024 by Kadokawa Corporation and TOHO, the copyright holders of the works summarized on the website (source: Content Overseas Distribution Association, hereafter CODA)
The problematic articles in question include a full summary of 2023 film Godzilla Minus One (owned by Toho) and the third season of the Overlord anime (owned by Kadokawa), which aired back in 2018. According to the prosecution, the Godzilla article was over 3,000 characters in length, explaining the plot of the film in detail from beginning to end, while the Overlord summary piece also included character names, transcribed dialogue, action, scenes, plot twists and several screenshots from the anime. Consequently, Kadokawa and Toho argued that this style of article constituted an “adaptation” of the original works, and could thus be considered copyright infringement.