I fear that this does not cleanly apply to Japan because of their somewhat uniquely active doujinshi (fan work) culture. To give an idea of how big a deal doujinshi are, the largest western convention San Diego Comic Con only draws around 130,000 attendants. The largest Doujinshi convention Comiket drew 750,000 attendants before COVID. These works are explicitly distributed and redistributed for commercial profit (though admittedly usually not at any profitable scale).
Japan copyright law has explicit exceptions for doujinshi, having recognised the immense value to the industry. So many successful artists started by creating and selling doujinshi, which are usually explicitly derivative works of IP.
Doujinshi - Wikipedia - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doujinshi
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
Yeah, and in the rest of the world where copyright is enforced, it’s first of all enforced against things like doujinshi. That’s the main financial force behind it. Japan just preserved saner rules for domestic culturally important industry, screwing the potential new ones.
OK, it’s not like they had much choice, US and Berne Convention style copyright was spread almost by threat of sanctions when it was a new thing.