[maxbond]

That's such a weird theory of harm. They still had to buy a copy of the game, right? So the harm is that the consumer would experience the story in the way they chose instead of the way the author intended? Death of the audience I suppose?

[ronsor]

No, this theory of harm is a direct consequence of the weird "moral rights" thing that is a part of Japanese copyright law.

[maxbond]

That's a good clarification, but it does lead us back to where we started. What's the harm of violating "integrity?" That the author doesn't get to present the story in the manner they chose.

[ronsor]

It only makes sense with the context of Japanese copyright law. Here's the actual text:

> (Right to Integrity)

> Article 20 (1) The author of a work has the right to preserve the integrity of that work and its title, and is not to be made to suffer any alteration, cut, or other modification thereto that is contrary to the author's intention.

If you distribute hacked save files, you are "cutting out" parts of the original game story, and thus violate this article.

Yes, it is ludicrous, but it's consistent, at least.

[mordae]

Czechia also has this clause in the copyright law. It sucks, because you can be sued for modifying FLOSS to do something that does not sit well with the original author(s).

Last time I've seen it used was for an architect to prevent us from using garbage bags of a different color. I am not kidding you. Their interior design was very specific (and good) and this was an attempt to save costs and it looked weird, but still

[calgoo]

So, in that case, I wonder what would happen if someone just flooded the internet with modified save files for free. Remove the money incentive and just publish thousands of uploads around the web from outside Japan.

[ronsor]

If the sites are hosted in Japan, then they could be taken down by Japanese courts. If the sites are hosted outside Japan, it's very likely nothing will happen.

[ranger_danger]

The internet is already flooded with modified save files for every game.

[numpad0]

Trying to profit off someone else's IP is the problematic part(as with any fake brand products). They don't go after every ad-supported save file repositories of curious interest.

[numpad0]

The most capitalist translation for this "integrity" is sales + customer loyalty, although it's slightly more than just direct financial income. Spoiled media content sells worse shorter term, and drags down related products longer term.

[maxbond]

I guess, "there's effectively a game in the market with our same branding and IP, allowing people to access only the scenes in our dating sim they want to, turning it into a different kind of application with deleterious associations to our brand" is a theory of harm I can grok. I don't think it would hurt short term sales in this particular case, but that could hurt the brand and thus long term sales. I have trouble parsing the rationale because it seems very anti-consumer, at least with this being my only exposure to Japanese law, but that probably wouldn't have flown in the US either.