Japanese Police Charge 2channel Founder Over Forum Posts 62
identity0 writes "According to Japan Probe, Hiroyuki Nishimura, the founder of 2ch.net, has been charged with drug offenses by Japanese police over a forum post made on 2ch in 2010. He is not even accused of making the post, but of failure to have moderators delete it. The post apparently discussed drugs. 2ch.net (also called 2channel) is Japan's biggest forum, with over a million posts a day, of which the post in question was one. The site inspired image board 2chan.net (but is not directly related to it), which spawned copycat English site 4chan.net. More info at Slashdot Japan, if you can read Japanese."
holy f*** there is a slashdot japan? (Score:5, Funny)
shiranakatta!
Re:holy f*** there is a slashdot japan? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
I am as stunned as you are. How many other localized /.s are there I wonder? Is there a slashdot in Russia? Germany? I think its neat.
Sadly I don't read any Japanese at all.
Re:holy f*** there is a slashdot japan? (Score:5, Informative)
I am as stunned as you are.
There's a link to Slashdot Japan at the bottom of every page, and has been for a long time.
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What's funny is that they don't even link back to this site :p (Just found the link, which was set as hidden in the stylesheet...)
I bet some of their readers don't even know it originated from here.
Perhaps because slashdot.jp seems to be owned by OSDN.jp, whereas slashdot.org now belongs to Dice.
Maybe they meant to hide it and forgot? The link in the footer on slashdot.org is visible on the homepage (and easily noticed when I look on my phone, which I often do). However, it's hidden on the story/comment pages.
Barrapunto (Score:4, Informative)
European Sprachbund (Score:2)
As someone how has spend at least ten times the amount of time studying Japanese compared to Spanish
When you learned English, you may have been studying Spanish and not even known it. English absorbed a lot of words from French in the eleventh century CE, and French is closely related to Spanish. In addition, both English and Spanish are within the European Sprachbund, in which certain "Euroversal" features [wikipedia.org] are common.
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I usually go there (have registered user), but I feel more informed here, on Slashdot.
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I am as stunned as you are. How many other localized /.s are there I wonder? Is there a slashdot in Russia? Germany? I think its neat.
Sadly I don't read any Japanese at all.
Nor do I, but Chrome obliged, and soon enough I verified that it is Slashdot and definitely Japanese. [slashdot.jp]
article headline: You can determine the "taste", "smell" computer years, 5 IBM?
subject: I M chairman of Japan
comment: It is not to be arrested for sample the smell of women's underwear in the train.
I know.
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note: slashdot japan is MADE IN USA
(grin)
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note: slashdot japan is MADE IN USA
The "World War on drugs" no less the same.
Re:holy f*** there is a slashdot japan? (Score:5, Informative)
Urban Legend [snopes.com]
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http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/usa.asp [snopes.com]
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I'd forgotten about the Slashdot japan site....
And judging by the lack of comments posted to the articles I'd have to say so did most of the Japanese userbase.
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They have better Christmas decorations that us, too! Look at that header bar.
So why not arrest all the moderators? (Score:5, Interesting)
So why did the police not arrest the obvious culprits ... all those moderators, each of which failed to delete that straw in the hay stack.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Because computers are hard.
Let's go bake cookies for the boys
Re:So why not arrest all the moderators? (Score:4, Interesting)
Even more fun: according to TFA, the guy they're charging sold the site some time before the post in question was made. He created the site, but wasn't in charge when this happened.
2Channel organized a protest against Fuji TV, who responded by running scandal story about 2channel being used by drug dealers. I guess if you annoy the media in Japan you expect prison time? Any Japanese /. readers care to clue us in here?
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http://www.japantoday.com/category/entertainment/view/freakonomics-documentary-looks-at-sumo-match-fixing-scandal [japantoday.com]
http://blackotaku.wordpress.com/2007/11/10/the-japanese-allow-criminals-to-get-away-with-murder/ [wordpress.com]
If something, buy investigating will cause national shame, it will not be investigated. The converse is said to be true also, bring up something you are not suppose to and you trouble may find you.
Police trying to expand laws (Score:2, Informative)
Abetting drug dealing is the crime they're claiming. They're trying to extend it to an obligation to prevent drug dealing. To abet he has to have read them and known they were real and not done anything about them.
He is not obligated to read every post and moderate those posts for possible illegality. He can't anyway, he can't know the people behind it and can't know if they are trolls or dealers, even if he bothered to read every post.
So this is a pretty shameful attempt by the Japanese police to extend a
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So even though the fault clearly lies with the moderators, they're trying to blame the person at the top, the founder.
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They are probably hoping he will tell them who is responsible, but 2ch has made a fair bit of effort to prevent it being governed by Japanese law.
There are no moderators in 2ch, just admins who can delete posts, but they rarely ever do.
so... (Score:2)
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He is not one of the old boy clan, or a polititian, or a media mogul. That's why.
Re:No Bill of Rights in Nippon? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that the European ideal where the UK arrests people for offensive facebook posts (indeed now has guidelines on it) and actually has no freedom of speech at all? Or Germany where they are so embarassed by the past they they would jail their own people lest they express opinions that could cause uneducated people to say bad things about Germans?
Perhaps France and their recent forays into legislating what people can wear on their heads?
Never mind our allies though (particularly some of the "other" ones like South Korea where we fought for their freedom to be jailed for insulting the government, or saudi arabia where all it takes is international pressure to show them the error of their belief that a woman who reports being gang raped should be stoned to death for admiting she had sex.... such an easy mistake to make that.)... perhaps you were thinking of the US?
You know, where we are free to have a trial as long as the president doesn't decide he doesn't want us to have one. Or where we keep plans to massively extend law enforcement authority in drawers waiting for the next disaster to push them through? Or where we ignore our own laws to ship captives out to be tortured?
Were those the sensibilities that you were looking for?
4chan (Score:1)
For comparison, here's how 4chan is being handled [imgur.com] (sorry for image rather than text).
TL;DR: there is not only thorough infiltration, but even the servers themselves have been physically moved to a rack owned by the spooks. With the amount of CP being posted to 4chan, it's not that surprising - what is interesting is that instead of playing whack-a-mole with chan sites, the biggest site itself has been partially subverted. At the cost of site quality (no moderation is done other than CP), but for the ease of
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2chan has this problem too (Score:1)
The 2chan guys have been sued hundreds of times. They simply ignore it. There are countless default judgements against them, which they also ignore.
I guess something about Japanese law makes these things toothless.
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Not just the law, the criminal system as well.
It's an open secret that the Japanese police tends to only pursue those crimes where there's also a good chance of getting a conviction or the situation requires it. Certainly makes for a good clear-up rate on paper, but it also means a lot of not so clean-cut murders are registered as accidents or natural causes.
Poor journalism (Score:1)
I forwarded this along to my Japanese wife, who went and researched into the issue. Her response:
That article is not accurate. The police has identified at least 50 drug dealers using the website to sell illegal drugs now. The police has requested the founder to delete those posts many times, but he claimed that the ownership of the site has been sold to someone (which turned out to be a lie), kept ignoring the police warnings, and left the posts there.
2ch used to be one of the most popular forums, but the quality of posts have been questionable in the past couple of years. In fact, my uncle owned a clinic and someone kept posting horrible stuff about the clinic, so my uncle had to move his practice to other place and changed the clinic name. They tried to sue 2ch for not doing quality control properly but back then, there were no laws that could protect their rights. 2ch is now turning into something different where you can buy/sell illegal stuff and adult/kids porn. It's really really bad.
If the situation was the case as Japan Probe reported, there would be some more mainstream news sources picking up on it (Asahi, Yomiuri, BBC, etc). I would evaluate their article with a grain of salt.
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He has no obligation to censor people on the request of the police. Just as you are free to make those claims here without censorship
Is that true in Japan? They don't have free speech. Remember how the Japanese government announced that it would be shutting down blogs giving information about Fukushima "in the public interest"? Japan is fascist, this is not news.