【Research Center for the Legal System of Intellectual Property】

Activities

Convergence of Telecommunication and Broadcasting

RC Tetsuya Imamura

Several years ago, although I rarely watched television, I had a chance to view some contents over the Internet because my junior fellow in school was involved in the project of TORESOLA, a broadband delivery service company established through a joint effort of three commercial TV stations, and I spent a lot of time sitting in front of the PC anyway. Those contents such as TV dramas delivered at that time were quite interesting although they were all charged. So I enjoyed those programs for a while.

Unfortunately, however, it seems this company stays dormant now. That means their business is unprofitable in short. TORESOLA was originally established for "the proof-of-concept experiment". The project sounds such a lavish spending but it seems this kind of result was expected from the beginning.

A major bottleneck seemed to be the copyright handling of the programs made for broadcasting. That would not surprise me. Basically, the copyright handling of the broadcasting programs is considered as a broadcasting license and the copyright does not grant all rights unlike the copyright of movies and sound recordings. The rights necessary for the broadband delivery service should be asked for permission in addition. And the cost for those rights must be borne by the licensee.

In this regard, the revision of the Copyright Law raised a drastic proposal to exceptionally adopt a retrospective approval for broadband delivery of TV programs in order to decrease the cost of the copyright handling. It would be definitely useful for smooth circulation of the contents. However, it will be probably difficult to reach a consensus between the licensors and the licensees. There is also a problem of the balance with other media such as newspapers or publications. The reality is, instead of a drastic law revision, it is the best to gradually build a consensus between the licensors and the licensees by a persistent and continuing discussion with a considerations to economic laws. Just like the tentative agreement for the usage rate of broadband delivery, which a working group in Japan Federation of Economic Organizations concluded. (Actually useful or not, the process is important).

The above is about the difficulty of the copyright handling regarding broadband delivery. Over the issue of broadcasting, there remain various problems including retransmission of program contents by an individual using a transmission system, a video sharing website like YouTube, and a response to terrestrial digital broadcasting or IP multicast broadcasting. In this age of convergence of telecommunication and broadcasting, it is highly expected to have a discussion "to create a future" by all parties concerned in order to seek a system or a market to harmonize benefits among the parties of licensors, the parties of licensees, and the viewers of the programs. Essentially, I would like to believe that innovation is enlarging the pie of the entire industry. While feeling sorry for the picture of conventional scholarly closing, I sincerely hope so.