1971: Film director loses copyright 04

Organizer:
Today, we have here with us the chairman and secretary-general of the Foreign Film and Animation Division of the Japan Actors Union, whose union movement was very successful last year (1991), as well as many people involved in animation.

Now, let me introduce lawyer Takezawa-sensei.
The Copyright Law was revised in 1971. *1
Takezawa-sensei is very knowledgeable about the activities and circumstances of the Copyright Council at that time. Today, I would like to start by asking about that.

Takezawa (hereafter abbreviated as T):
As you have introduced, the current Copyright Law was revised in 1971.
The Copyright Law that existed before that is called the "旧著作権法(Old Copyright Law)."

This law was enacted in July 1899, and since it was nearly 80 years old, there were opinions that it was outdated and unusable, and the momentum for legal reform that had been around since the end of the war really took off in the 1960s.

At that time, there were many proposals for amending the Copyright Law. The most problematic of these was film copyright. At that time, people (those involved and related parties) gathered almost every day to debate and petition the Ministry of Education and the Diet.

As a result, the current Copyright Law was created.
Many of the problems with the old copyright law were largely resolved (by the 1971 amendment), but film copyright was forcibly left unresolved.

When this new Copyright Law was put before the Diet, people in the fields of literature, music, art, and other fields did not have much objection to the new Copyright Law, but I think that those involved in film were the ones who opposed it the most. *2

*1 In lectures, we often use the era name, but in this blog, we will convert it to the Gregorian calendar (CE).

*2 In 1971, the Copyright Law was revised not only for films, but also for other fields.

**This transcript of the lecture has not been reproduced verbatim from the audio tape; rather, the order of the comments has been rearranged and additional explanations in parentheses have been added to make it easier to understand. All photographs were taken by Hiroshi Harada.

(To be continued)