The Supreme Court's Third Petty Bench has ruled that the automatic cropping of images posted on Twitter when they are retweeted is an infringement on creators' rights.
In the Tuesday ruling, presiding judge Saburo Tokura stated, "Trimming removes the creator's name from the image, which makes retweets an infringement."
The petty bench rejected the final appeal by Twitter Inc. The decision finalizes a ruling by the Intellectual Property High Court that ordered the company to disclose the email addresses of the users who retweeted the image. The ruling was joined by four of the bench's five judges.
Retweets are widely used to spread posts. In doing so, images are sometimes automatically cropped to meet Twitter's specifications. If Twitter does not change its display specifications, future retweets may be considered an infringement of rights in Japan.
The plaintiff was a male photographer from Hokkaido. In 2009 he took a picture of a lily of the valley and posted it on his website. In 2014, the image was posted on Twitter without his permission, and was retweeted by three more accounts. The plaintiff filed a lawsuit seeking information on the three accounts.
The photographer's name appeared at the bottom of the image of the flower, but disappeared on the retweeted images because part of the top and bottom had been cropped. The plaintiff argued, "Retweeting infringed on the author's right to display his name on his work."
Twitter countered that, "If a user clicks on the cropped image, they will see the original image that includes the author's name."
However, the petty bench recognized an infringement of the Copyright Law because, "Users do not necessarily click [on images], and thus the people who retweeted it violated the creator's right to display his name."
In a dissent, Judge Keiichi Hayashi said, "Trimming is performed according to Twitter's specification. It cannot be ruled that the poster was the entity that violated [the creator's] rights."
In September 2016, the Tokyo District Court rejected the plaintiff's claim at the first trial. In April 2018, an upper court ruling found that in addition to infringing on the creator's right to display his name, retweeting also violated the right of integrity, which does not allow the content of works to be changed against a creator's wishes.
Twitter is a typical social network that counts public institutions among its many users. According to the ruling, there are about 45 million users in Japan. A representative of Twitter Japan declined to comment on the ruling.
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