>>28771God I fucking wish that were true. I believe it was Nintendo that actually tried to make video game rentals illegal in the US, too. Japan somehow has a copyright system that is more plutocratic and oppressive than the US, and that's really saying something.
That's part of the reason why a lot of people will have good relationships with the Western-facing office of a Japanese company and then turn around and get a bunch of DMCAs from the Eastern side. Japanese people literally have no concept of copyright beyond their country, so they will oftentimes project their laws onto foriegn companies; and, even when they're wrong, most smaller businesses will go bankrupt, anyways. One company that comes to mind was this one whose product was an emulator Sega for another console written in assembly. Flubby, I think it was called? They didn't resell games at all, but they had these super optimized, per-game emulators for a really limited catalog of games. They won the lawsuit, but they immediately went bankrupt. A good example of Japanese companies exploiting copyright/trademark/patents to skew the market in their favor.