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."
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.
Barrapunto (Score:4, Informative)
Re:holy f*** there is a slashdot japan? (Score:5, Informative)
Urban Legend [snopes.com]
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 law. If they succeed it (further) decrease freedom of speech.
If the posts were for drug deals and public, then the police could have made a drug deal, and arrested the dealers. So it seems unlikely that they were in fact real drug deal posts.