The Cultural Council proposed Tuesday banning the downloading of "chaku-mero" ringing melodies for cell phones, moving images and other sound and visual content from the Internet without the author's permission.
The proposal is intended mainly to protect the music industry from rampant copyright violations via illegal Internet sites.
Uploading music and other content onto the Internet without the author's permission is prohibited under Japanese copyright law. But there is no law that bans downloading such content.
The council, an advisory body to the Agency for Cultural Affairs, explicitly called the downloading of content from the Net without copyright holder permission illegal, but it stopped short of proposing penalties.