Fourteen days of silence is now a three-year copyright licence in Japan.

The consensus reading of the 令和5年 copyright amendment is that Japan finally freed its orphan works. Read as a price list rather than as a press release, the documents say something narrower and stranger. The old route, 第67条, is for a rightsholder who cannot be found. The new one is not. Its subject is a rightsholder who can be found, whose address you have, who received your letter — and who did not answer it. 文化庁’s own answer to the question 「どのような場合に対象になるか」 puts the threshold at fourteen days.

What the new route sells is therefore two things, and neither of them is cheapness. The first is eligibility: a class of work the old route could never touch, because its owner was never unknown. The second is time. 文化庁’s 裁定の手引き 概要版 puts the new path at 8営業日程度 against the old path’s 「標準処理期間は、約２か月を想定しています」 — roughly 12 calendar days against 61, a saving of 49 days and a 5.1× speed-up. That is the product. The price of it went the other way.

The fee is ¥13,800 before tax, ¥15,180 with 消費税, per application, and the government set it deliberately at twice the old one. In exchange the term is capped where the old one has none: 第67条の3第5項 against 第67条, which 文化庁 summarises as 「上限なし」. Per work-year of clearance that is ¥5,060 on the new route against ¥2,300 on the old — and the old route would have to expire after 1.36 years to cost as much. It never expires. So on every axis except eligibility and speed, the reform made clearance more expensive and more temporary.

Now the counterparty. On 令和7年10月21日 文化庁 registered 公益社団法人著作権情報センター as the 登録確認機関 under 第104条の33第1項 and, the same day, designated the same organisation as the 指定補償金管理機関 under 第104条の18. Its 確認等事務規程, approved 令和8年2月20日, states at 第14条 that it computes the 使用料相当額 by 「文化庁のウェブサイト上に公開されている裁定補償金額シミュレーションシステムによる算出方法」 — the ministry’s own calculator. One body receives the application, decides whether it qualifies, sets the price, takes the payment, and — where the owner never appears — administers the residue through the 著作物等保護利用円滑化事業. There is no second body to go to.

Who actually uses any of this is the part nobody writes down. 文化庁’s 裁定実績データベース for 令和6年度 lists 185 works, and the applicants are almost all one trade: 株式会社声の教育社, 駿台文庫株式会社, 株式会社世界思想社教学社, 株式会社エデュケーショナルネットワーク — exam-paper publishers clearing the essays quoted inside university entrance examinations. 世界思想社教学社 is the publisher of 赤本, 「370大学550点に及ぶ「大学赤本シリーズ」」, which tells its own readers that 「入試問題そのものの著作権は各大学が有しており、また英語や国語で使用されている文章等にもそれぞれ著作権者が存在します。」 The blank pages in Japan’s best-known revision series are a rights-clearance failure, printed half a million times a year.

So the non-consensus claim: the reform did not open a market, it opened a queue, and the queue is one trade deep. A solo operator selling clearance into it at ¥20,000 a work would need 60.6 works a month — 727 a year, 3.93× everything Japan cleared under the old route in 令和6年度 — to net ¥799,250 a month. Even at ¥74,474 a work the operator needs the entire national annual volume to itself. And 行政書士法第19条 reserves the act of preparing, for a fee, documents to be filed with a public office; 第21条 prices breaking that at 「一年以下の懲役又は百万円以下の罰金」. The statute is remarkable. The business underneath it is not there yet.

The one-line contrast with the country this page is not about: the United States has no general orphan-works licence at all, so the comparison is between a priced route and no route.