Mixi chief calls for looser content sharing laws

The CEO of Japan’s leading social networking site, Mixi Inc., said Wednesday he hopes the country’s law will be changed to allow users more freedom in sharing and viewing copyrighted content on the Internet.

Mixi is Japan’s third largest Web site in terms of traffic and enjoys more than 8 million users, two-thirds of whom log in at least once every four days to update their online diary, share pictures with friends and participate in group discussion forums.

“Presently it is very difficult to upload any film that was shown on TV and distribute that over the Internet,” Kenji Kasahara said at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo. “I do hope that will change because I believe that it is natural that people want to see and listen to music and video on the Internet. I do hope that it will become easier and the law will offer a legal way to do that over the Internet.”

“In the end I hope we will have a situation where the copyright holders, the people who view and listen to music and the people who provide that content can all be happy together,” he said.

Kenji Kasahara’s comments come a day after YouTube’s top executives met with Japanese copyright holders to hear complaints about the amount of Japanese content on YouTube. They also follow Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ open letter for music companies to abandon the idea of digital rights management for downloaded music.

To date Mixi hasn’t had to contend much with the need to police its user base for copyrighted content. Much of the site consists of user-generated content, of which the vast majority is text and photos.

On Monday Mixi started allowing users the ability to upload videos, but in an attempt to head-off copyright violations is limiting single clips to either five minutes in length or 50MB in size. It also requires users to click an agreement that they won’t upload copyrighted content. However most Web sites take this same step and it generally doesn’t stop users uploading whatever they want.

“We hope that we can prevent any violation of copyright,” said Kasahara. He said he believes most users want to upload personal content to show to friends and the number of people that might use the platform to share copyrighted content is low.