Aozora Bunko (, , also known as the "Open Air Library") is a Japanese

digital library A digital library (also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, a library without walls, or a digital collection) is an online database of digital resources that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital ...

. This online collection encompasses several thousand works of Japanese-language fiction and non-fiction. These include out-of-

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, ...

books or works that the authors wish to make freely available. Since its inception in 1997, Aozora Bunko has been both the compiler and publisher of an evolving online catalog. Intute
Intute web site, Aozora Bunko project description
In 2006, Aozora Bunko organized to add a role as a public policy advocate to protect its current and anticipated catalog of freely accessible

e-book An ebook (short for electronic book), also spelled as e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in electronic form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Al ...

History and operation

Aozora Bunko was created on the Internet in 1997 to provide broadly available, free access to Japanese literary works whose copyrights had expired. The driving force behind the project was Michio Tomita ( 富田倫生, 1952–2013), who was motivated by the belief that people with a common interest should cooperate with each other. In

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

, Aozora Bunko is considered similar to

Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital li ...

.Tamura, Aya
"Novelists, others want copyright protection extended"
'' The Japan Times Online.'' September 30, 2006. Most of the texts provided are

Japanese literature Japanese literature throughout most of its history has been influenced by cultural contact with neighboring Asian literatures, most notably China and its literature. Early texts were often written in pure Classical Chinese or , a Chinese-Japa ...

, and some translations from

English literature English literature is literature written in the English language from the English-speaking world. The English language has developed over more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian languages, Anglo-Frisian d ...

. The resources are searchable by category, author, or title; and there is a considerable amount of support on how to use the database in the form of detailed explanations. The files can be downloaded in

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

format or simply viewed in

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

format. After the passing of Michio Tomita in 2013, the was established independently to assist funding and operations for Aozora Bunko. Aozora Bunko currently includes more than 15,100 works .

Public policy advocacy

Aozora Bunko joined with others in organizing to oppose changes to the Japanese copyright law. That opposition has led to encouraging Japanese citizens to submit letters and petitions to the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs and to members of the Japanese Diet. N0-70

Japan and other countries accepted the terms of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, an 1886 international agreement about common copyright policies. Aozora Bunko adopted an advocacy role in favor of continuing with the ''status quo,'' wherein laws do not go beyond the minimum copyright terms of the Berne Convention. These laws have copyrights that run for the lifetime of the author plus 50 years, which Aozora Bunko believes is preferable to changes proposed by a number of influential groups pushing for longer copyright terms. The evolution of Aozora Bunko from a digital library to a public policy advocacy organization was an unintended consequence which developed only after the perceived threat to the Aozora Bunko catalog and mission became otherwise unavoidable.

Problems

Aozora Bunko pointed that extension of the copyright term had been influenced from the document titled "The U.S.–Japan Regulatory Reform and Competition Policy Initiative." Through these annual reports, the U.S. Government was requiring that the protected period of copyright should be extended to the Japanese government: 70 years after one's death for a work by an individual, and 95 years after publication for a work by a corporation. In response, the Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan has expressed that a conclusion will be obtained at the Council for Cultural Affairs copyright subcommittee by the end of 2007. If the legal revision which extends the protected period of copyright will be actually carried out, Aozora Bunko would be forced not to publish books which have already or almost already been published, due to the 20 years extension of the protection of copyright. Therefore, Aozora Bunko released a counter declaration against enforcement of the revised law on 1 January 2005, and they started to collect the signatures for a petition on 1 January 2007. Due to the regime change in 2009 in Japan, Japanese government stopped receiving these reports from the U.S. government. Aozora Bunko did not respond to that and their petition calling for opposition against the extension of copyright term stopped from the modification of October 2008. Instead of the document, the website of the

Office of the United States Trade Representative The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) is an agency of the United States federal government responsible for developing and promoting United States foreign trade policies. Part of the Executive Office of the President, it ...

inserted the "UNITED STATES–JAPAN ECONOMIC HARMONIZATION INITIATIVE" in February 2011. In the document, the U.S. government promoted the extension of copyright law for protection of intellectual property rights toward Japanese government so that it was "in line with emerging global trends, including those of its OECD counterparts and major trading partners." On 30 December 2018, Japan did extend the period to 70 years, which was a requirement stemming from the EU–Japan Economic Partnership Agreement.

Notes

References

* Bovens, Andreas (2005)
"Closed Architectures for Content Distribution,"
''Japan Media Review'' (University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication)

* Donovan, Maureen H. (2006)
''Accessing Japanese Digital Libraries: Three Case Studies.''
Berlin:

Springer Springer or springers may refer to: Publishers * Springer Science+Business Media, aka Springer International Publishing, a worldwide publishing group founded in 1842 in Germany formerly known as Springer-Verlag. ** Springer Nature, a multinationa ...

. . * Lessig, Lawrence (2004)
''Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.''
New York: Penguin Press. , (cloth) * Tamura, Aya
"Novelists, others want copyright protection extended"
'' The Japan Times Online.'' September 30, 2006. * Tomita, Michio
"Enable Library, ''Aozora Bunko'' as an 'Enable Library'"
''Gendai no Toshokan.'' Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 176–181 (1999). * Tomita, Michio
"Dream of perpetual Aozora Bunko, a private electronic library,"
''Art research'' (Ritsumeikan University). Vol.2, pp. 49–56 (2001). * Yamamoto, Shuichiro
"What Is Knowledge That Generates Value?" Science Links Japan web site
(2008).

External links