1971: Film director loses copyright 14

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The Directors Guild of Japan claims that "it is the director who creatively contributes to the overall formation of a film."
Screenwriters are now protected separately under a different article, so they are left out of this issue.　*1

When it comes to the new amendment that the copyright of a film belongs to the "producer (company) with the "衣" attached, everyone in the film industry is united in saying, "That's a stupid idea!"

However, when it comes to the question of "who owns the copyright of a film," I learned that everyone has a different position and there are subtle differences of opinion.
When a law is made, it goes to the Fairness Council, which includes university professors and copyright experts, so (those in the film industry who have doubts about the new copyright proposal) go to them to make requests.

A constitutional law professor from the University of Tokyo named Yoshitoshi Miyazawa participated in this Copyright Law Council because he is knowledgeable about copyright.
Professor Miyazawa argued that even if Article 29 (which assigns copyright to the company) was decided, directors and cameramen can still fully assert and secure their interests when signing contracts. They can just make a contract.
Also, if necessary for those contracts, directors and cameramen can form a union and negotiate collectively to protect their interests based on the contract. *2

This seems to have been the result of the arguments of the experts who participated in the legislation.
In other words, their interpretation was that "rather than each staff member asserting, 'I own this percentage,' it would be better to have the copyright assigned to the company and unify it, so that there would be no confusion as many staff members assert their rights."

With that interpretation, it seems to me that the experts went ahead and completed this law (the new copyright law).



*1 Music is also protected by a different article, so it is not included in this discussion.

*2 This method was first tried by the president of Mushi Productions (a democratic company that was rebuilt by a labor union after bankruptcy) (who was a former labor union member), but it didn't work well. The president of Mushi Productions said that the burden of those tasks went to the management, and that if they spent time on that, a small company couldn't survive.
After that, Studio Ghibli started to return royalties to its main staff, but we don't know what has happened since then.
In recent years, Toei Animation also started to return royalties to its main staff. It seemed to us that their true feelings were that "We don't want to have trouble later on when we're making a profit from secondary usage fees."
As for the idea of ​​forming a union, as we previously introduced in this blog, we think that it would be difficult for busy filmmakers working long hours to form any more copyright organizations.
The Actors' Association, which formed the union, seems to be struggling as well.
The Music Copyright Association seems to have a good system in place, but as we have already said, we have doubts about its recent management policy.