Recently I have been looking for a specific issue of an old 1985 Japanese PC magazine, but there are non currently for sale, nor have there been any sold for some time judging by sold listings. Over the past several years what I would normally do in this scenario is play the waiting game and hope one pops up for sale and that I can win it. But this time I decided to play things a little different, after finding a detailed table of contents for the magazine at Japan’s National Diet Library (NDL) and seeing that they offered a remote duplication service.
I thought I’d document this very useful, somewhat archaic, but thoroughly charming process.
Very interesting, but you left me wanting more information. What was so special about this magazine? And I assume one particular article, since you only needed 3 pages.
It was a feature describing a computer game written by a reader of the magazine. That makes it pretty much as old as Tetris. The source code listing was elsewhere in the magazine, so involved a separate request. I'm sure I'll blog about the specifics in future as that is a really interesting story in and of itself.
This is cool, I'm imagining the slight confusion of a Japanese librarian to scan three pages of an old computer magazine and ship it to the UK. Curious though, what's so interesting about the TOC to have it physically?
Reminds me of being a student in the uk in the late eighties / early nineties and ordering stuff from the British Library document supply centre. First burrow into the microfiche indexes to find the full citations of the obscure stuff, then fill in the paper form, then wait a few weeks for the fat envelope of photocopies to arrive at the uni library. Definite need to plan ahead back then.
Seems strange in the US but even in the UK (for example) some digital scans have a 25-year copyright protection added:
> Typographical copyright
> If scanning a copyright-expired work from a British publication, typographical copyright must be borne in mind. This subsists for 25 years from creation of the publication and covers the typographical arrangement of the publication. It does not exist in the United States.
This is an important reminder that the US is one of the weirdest countries when it comes to copyright (despite the lobbying done by Disney, MPA and RIAA it's still one of the most liberal IP regimes in the world).
> How/why is it that their copyright law allows them to literally make a copy but not scan and send it?
Total speculation: but maybe there's a narrow fair use exception that only applies to photocopies. Which makes a certain amount of sense: a photocopy suffers generation loss, but a digital scan can be infinitely duplicated perfectly.
Article 31 of Japan's copyright law (著作権法第31条) gives National Diet Library (and a few approved public libraries) a special exception which allows them to make a photocopy of a copyrighted material as long as it's "for researching purpose", "part of a work" (i.e., less than 50% of a book or an article), and "one copy per person".[1]
IANAL, but I think it could be that a digital copy is no longer "one copy per person" as you can make unlimited copies from it, as well as sending it digitally is already making two copies between sender and receiver.
Certainly such compulsory-licensing schemes for photocopying of books in libraries are not uncommon: the ALCS hands out the money from the UK's, for instance https://www.alcs.co.uk/where-the-money-comes-from . Japan's scheme still not allowing the national library to share digital scans would certainly fit the conventional wisdom about that country being slow to embrace digitisation, but really the digital-lending-rights situation is probably a bin-fire everywhere, just not in quite the same way everywhere. And in fact I think Japanese law might be unusually generous (IANAL!) if it lets the national library copy an arbitrary number of magazine pages for anyone anywhere in the world.
It's a library national law thing to spread knowledge. The Chinese culture went one step further it does not allow you monopoly to an idea where copying is encourage to promote innovation and spread of knowledge.
You're making an assumption that what the librarians is doing is lawful. It may or may not. Librarians are not lawyers. We also don't know if these librarians are breaking the law knowing or unknowingly. (AU lawyer, no idea about Japanese copyright law)
Libraries, backed by professional associations and legal departments, usually follow developments regarding copyright laws (at least on a national level) very closely und provide detailed guidelines for their employees on how to handle these kinds of requests. Your typical librarian is probably more knowledgeable about copyright regulations than the average citizen. Also, some librarians are also legal professionals (I'm friends with two such persons).
I think it is a modarately safe bet that the people who designed the processes used by the official library of the Japanese parliament have a reasonable grasp of the applicable laws.
Readit News
I thought I’d document this very useful, somewhat archaic, but thoroughly charming process.
https://customprints.nga.gov/
https://shop.nationalgallery.org.uk/
https://gallica.bnf.fr/accueil/en/content/accueil-en
https://gallica-bnf-fr.translate.goog/blog/11122015/des-tira...
The trusting yet maximally awkward payment process where you get paper invoices and need to mail around links is super Japanese though.
> Typographical copyright
> If scanning a copyright-expired work from a British publication, typographical copyright must be borne in mind. This subsists for 25 years from creation of the publication and covers the typographical arrangement of the publication. It does not exist in the United States.
This is an important reminder that the US is one of the weirdest countries when it comes to copyright (despite the lobbying done by Disney, MPA and RIAA it's still one of the most liberal IP regimes in the world).
Total speculation: but maybe there's a narrow fair use exception that only applies to photocopies. Which makes a certain amount of sense: a photocopy suffers generation loss, but a digital scan can be infinitely duplicated perfectly.
IANAL, but I think it could be that a digital copy is no longer "one copy per person" as you can make unlimited copies from it, as well as sending it digitally is already making two copies between sender and receiver.
[1]: https://www.cric.or.jp/english/clj/cl2.html (Article 31)^1
^1: Though this translation is slightly outdated, there were some revisions to copyright law in 2021, but this part is mostly unaffected.
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Laws are different
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