David Humphrey | The Death of “Publicness”: Japanese digital frameworks and access
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 2019-05-29

David Humphrey | Michigan State University

This paper examines digital frameworks’ impact on access to and scholarship in media and text archives in Japan, with a focus on shifts in media’s “publicness” (kōkyōsei) there. To these ends, it focuses on two developments in recent years: the transition to digital television broadcast, and revisions to copyright law over the past decade. Digital broadcast introduced to Japanese television the use of a Conditional Access System (CAS) that reconfigured the fundamentals of television in Japan. While legal language had historically defined broadcast television as an open-access medium that serves the public interest, the CAS system further entrenched content-holders’ intellectual property rights over viewers’ use rights. Similarly, attempts to revise copyright law in Japan have tended to favor intellectual property over access rights, hewing to international frameworks such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, and have transformed—or seek to transform—access to and use of new and old media alike.

My analysis contextualizes these developments as responses to the spread of digital frameworks and frames them as outgrowths of discourses, which privilege public security over public access. I suggest that these discourses have had significant consequences, in that they have served to justify attempts to curtail, manage and even criminalize mundane activities. Including the digitization of texts and recording of audiovisual material, these activities are notably crucial to scholarship. Through my analysis, I highlight how international frameworks and local discourses intersect to shape access, while also examining attempts to circumvent or push back against new restrictions. In conclusion, I further consider what a re-examination of the notion of “publicness”—a bedrock principal in the postwar Japanese media landscape that has largely fallen into disuse—might offer to contemporary discussions of open access.

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