Japan’s Approach to Cyberdefamation

Salil Mehra, Temple University School of Law, has published Criminalizing Cyberdefamation: Does Private Ordering Need Public Prosecutors? Here is the abstract.

This article sets forth two main points. First, it tries to explain why a modern constitutional democracy and industrialized society like Japan might choose criminal, in addition to civil, enforcement against online defamation. Second, it fits Japan’s experience to the theory that generally, attempts to use social norms and reputation to regulate behavior in modern societies may fail if they do not track individual incentives and if they cannot handle technological change. Such innovation may provide an end run around private ordering; the appearance of widely-used, purportedly anonymous Internet message boards appears to have short-circuited the balance of reputation and social norms that characterizes Japanese society. State intervention, such as public prosecution, may be required to maintain the existing system of private ordering through reputation and social sanction.

The paper is available through SSRN here.