KYOTO — A Japanese webmaster was arrested last week for posting copyrighted content by local studios after unblurring the pixelated areas around the genitals, which the country’s peculiar obscenity laws mandate.
According to the English-language Japanese news site Mainichi, “Kyoto Prefectural Police arrested self-employed suspect Masayuki Nakamoto, 43, from the west Japan city of Takasago, Hyogo Prefecture, on October 18 on suspicion of violating the Copyright Act and displaying ‘obscene electromagnetic recorded media.’”
The arrest is believed to be Japan's first for such an offense, in which artificial intelligence seems to have been used to unblur genitals.
The charges against Nakamoto involve a January post, on a site he had been running since November 2020, of a scene by a Tokyo studio, which he allegedly “processed to make it look like the pixelated parts were removed.”
Nakamoto is also accused of copyright infringement and piracy for “creating obscene images from the video and uploading them to his own website, thereby making it visible to an unspecified, large online audience.”
According to Mainichi, Nakamoto reportedly admitted he had posted the video to his site.
Kyoto police accused Nakamoto of using the AI model known as “TecoGAN” to “increase the resolution of pixelated images,” and “processing and selling, at the request of customers, videos made to appear almost unaltered.”
Prefectural Police digital forensics experts determined that Nakamoto allegedly sold 2,561 video files for a total of around 11 million yen, or about $96,000.
Nakamoto was also allegedly selling videos on other websites, and the investigation is ongoing.
