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Digital Shoplifting From Bookstores?
ipandithurts writes "According to a report from Tokyo via IOL, Japanese publishers have launched a campaign to stop 'digital shoplifters.' These 'digital shoplifters' are using cellphones to photograph magazine pages in bookstores, rather than buying them. 'Digital shoplifting is becoming a big problem as camera-equipped mobile handsets are spreading fast and their quality is improving greatly,' said Kenji Takahashi, an official at the Japan Magazine Publishers Association. Will entry into a bookstore soon include a 'cell-phone patdown?'"
Sounds to me like magazines must be WAY overpriced there.
Subject says it all.
I've been waiting for a story like this to come along for awhile now. IMHO this signifies the start of an unevitable transition to paperless media. with hard copy so easy to get for free, about the only for print media to ensure it's position would be to become exclusively mail-based.
Cogito Eggo Sum, I think therefore I'm a waffle
It's one thing to photograph a 100 page magazine where half the pages are ads, but do you really think people will sit there in the store undetected while they take pictures of all 900 and some pages of the new Harry Potter book?
Simple solution if they don't want people browsing the magazines with the risk of them photgraphing them, put them behind the counter.
It's troubling that the intellectually unwholesome analogy which the record and movie industry lobby groups in America, that copying is identical to stealing, is finding purchase in other cultures.
Copying is one thing, stealing/shoplifting is another. Copying may not be good, but for goodness sake it's different than stealing! This press release, and the 'educational' campaign that it outlines, clouds thought in contexts where it need not be clouded.
Between this, the problems with music/movie/software piracy and copyright abuse and confusion, and even micropayment schemes, it is becoming apparent that technology is fast approaching a point where it will be hard for companies that provide a service, specifically concerning information and even products whose sole purpose is to inform (books and magazines) to continue to justify why we have to pay for the material the book is made out of and the shelves that hold the books and the people that make and stock them when we could do it all digitally. as it becomes easier to store, move and view digital information, business built around the fact that the info had to physically get out there are panicking, how much worse can it get?
I remember when all the newspapers began to publish their work on the internet. Everyone said that none would buy the paper version anymore and that the newspapers would have to charge money for viewing their news on the net.
I think this is these "doomsday" warnings all over again
The problem with any society is that there is always going to be some low life that does not want to work for what they have. Rather they want to take it without appreciation for the investment in time and effort that any thing worth while takes to either manufacture or compensate the creator of that item for. Technology will always facillitate this and will open new pathways for old crimes.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
... in Japanese?
They probably caught one person doing it and had to make a big stink about it.
This is pretty bogus if you think about it. Try taking a picture of a magazine page at a news stand and see just how readable it is.
Must be a slow news day in Japan. I guess Godzilla and Gamera are shacking up in Mexico again...
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Perhaps money intended to be allocated to preventing digital shoplifting would be best invested in or donated to libraries - the books are free to borrow and if there isn't a copy available, you either wait until it's returned or suck it up and buy the book. I mean sweet merciful crap - taking 1000 pictures in a readable quality (a quality you would WANT to read) would amount to like 700MB. That's a hella-expensive phone/camera/mailbox.
I'm not too current on cell phones (I still use an original StarTac) but do these things have a high enough resolution to take a good snapshot of a page of a book or magazine? From the demos I've seen, I'm guessing the resolution of the cameras found on most phones is 640x480 at most.
Is this really a problem or is this just some case where *one* crazy guy walked into a bookstore and started taking snapshots with his phone (or camera)?
Not sure about other places, but the Kinokuniya (which is apparently a Japanese chain) store in Singapore has some of its books and magazines in shrinkwrap, ostensibly to stop buyers (and digital "shoplifters", if you like) from browsing through the books.
If you ask me, that's simpler, yet more effective, than posters, paranoia and hype.
More than mere navel gazing.
The recent success of 'downloadable music' sites should be a wakeup call! This is where the paper industry can one-up the music industry. Clearly they are beginning to realize a demand for works to be distributed in digital format. Now all they have to do is fulfill that need [and make money], instead of trying to kill another distribution method [and spend money].
They can go to all this effort or just goto the library and then get a copy for free and read it in the comfort of their own home or am I missing something?
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Buyers want all goods to be free. Sellers want all goods to have a high price. The goods themselves really don't "want" anything. Inanimate objects really don't have complex desires and social lives like the gurus pretend they do.
Saying a car "wants" to go fast or information "wants" to be free is just an anthtropomorphism. It is you, as a buyer, assigning your emotions on to an object.
No newsstand or any other specific place was cited. No quotes from anyone who actually did it or actual "victims" were used. The closest anyone comes is the one who said that she took pictures out of a hair style catalogue to a hairdresser to avoid taking the actual (heavy) book. A human face is the sort of thing highly compressed low-res images do best. There's a very big difference between this (which probably is fair usage and grabbing a magazine full of text and images frame-by-frame.
Hand scanners might make sense, but low-res mobile phone cams?
How many newsstands are going to let a cell phone user stand and photograph every page a 100 page magazine? What's the quality going to be like? JPGs including text images are rather hard to read unless a very low level of compression is used. Are mobile phones that much better at handling text detail in uploadable pictures? More to the point, isn't the pixel count in a mobile phonecam low enough that reproducing copy that might be typeset at 1200-2400 dpi is sort of hopeless?
What's the billing per image as uploaded via mobile? At more than 10 cents USD / frame, it would be generally cheaper to buy the magazine even assuming the user's time is worth nothing.
Has anyone actually seen this done and what the results look like?
If this really is a serious concern, spend the extra penny and shrinkwrap the suckers. Busting the shrinkwrap is vandalism of merchandise. No new law is needed.
I think some content providers are trying to get some PR support for anti-technology copy control legislation of some sort in Japan... i.e. something that looks good to elected officials who don't think terribly hard about what they're being asked to support.
Tech Public Policy stuff
How long before stores start installing photo-jammers?
All of modern technology seems to be going that way. A constant arms race between the people trying to sell a device to perform a function and the people trying to sell a device or service to prevent the function from being performed.
And here comes the problem. People browse magazine in book store and find a small tidbit of information that they want. Maybe a map, maybe date of some special events. Instead of buying the magazine, people just take the photo of the info that they want. People can take a small piece of paper and take note when they browse thru magazine in book store. The camera-cellphone just makes it more convinient to do.
--- (The signature is intentionally left blank)
OK, obviously you can't phone-copy a whole magazine, just a few of the pages you like the best, say the latest fashion shots, or whatever.
But. How about starting a club; 26 people in it. You take turns buying the magazine, scanning it on your home scanner, and then publishing it on a private homepage. Then you just have to pay for the mag every 2 years, and you still get to read every issue, in your home, with high quality picture.
Semantics aside, if you take something without paying for it (assuming the creator/owner of that thing intended for you to pay for it), regardless of whether or not it is a physical object or a digital copy, or if it doesn't seem to adversely affect the owner, it is still wrong, and I call it stealing.
Just because you can't afford it, and the "original" still exists, doesn't make it acceptable, or justifiable. It also doesn't mean that you SHOULD be able to benefit from it.
If you can't afford to pay for it, WHY should you get to have it? It goes back to that over-inflated sense of self-entitlement that I was referring to earlier.
As to the electricity example, sure, that's a little far fetched. How about cable? If you steal cable, it (usually) doesn't affect the quality of the "original", so does that mean you're copying it, and you should be allowed to because it's not a physical object? I'd say "no", because it's a service, and it's still theft.
Maybe selling a magazine is more of a sale of a "service" as opposed to a sale of a physical object... it just happens that the service is in part contained within the object in the form of created or compiled works. Regardless of the status of the object, the service of compiling and arranging information, and then transferring the knowledge/information compiled within that magazine has been performed.
I've always assumed that browsing magazines was intended to allow the potential purchaser to peruse the content so that they could get a feel for the content and quality, not to read it in its entirety or copy it. Maybe we'll see the browsing of magazines eliminated due to what seems to me to be a "breach of trust".
I still think that if you take something that you haven't paid for, that is theft. That includes making a digital copy of something that you haven't purchased.
Now, if you've purchased something, like a CD or DVD, I fully believe that you can make as many copies as you want, for your own personal use. But once again, it was paid for.
$0.02 (CDN)
> Semantics aside [...]
How can you rant about a semantics thread by starting with "Semantics aside"?
Your argument is along the lines of "it's bad so it's stealing". So what if I get my hair cut and run out without paying? Can you "steal" a hair-cut? Yes, it's illegal, but it's a different "crime". Just like murder is different from vandalism.
Semantics are important in this case, because people have a much stronger response to "theft" than to "copyright violation". So the author of the original article used incorrect language intentionally to convince the reader. It is perfectly legitimate to point this out, and every single poster in this thread has acknowledged that they think copyright violation *should* be illegal.
ponxx
Why would I actually go into a bookshop if all the books are shrinkwrapped? The only advantage a bookshop has over Amazon.com is that I can randomly browse through books as the whim takes me. The goal of the book retailer is to increase their overall sales, and turning the store into basically a warehouse would lose more customers than rudimentary digital counterfeiting.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Why is that a cop-out? A high-tech solution (of the kind most /.ers would propose) will always have some sort of work-around, but low-tech solutions are more robust. For instance, there's a reason why electronic internet voting hasn't really taken off in many places yet: there are authentication and verification problems that simply vanish (or become much less of a problem) when you require someone to report to a polling place and physically sign in.
This low-tech shrink-wrapping solution gives publishers a choice: do they shrink-wrap their magazines and risk losing purchases from people who browse to find what to buy, or do they not shrink-wrap and risk losing purchases from people who would have otherwise bought the entire magazine, but instead are satisfied with browsing (or copying) a few pages? Publishers can choose based on what type of content they sell, and people can choose to browse and buy as they see fit. Everyone wins, and we didn't need any new laws or technological restrictions! Why is that a cop-out?
Actually, the two definitions of theft as most commonly applied to crimes anyway are: (1) To take (the property of another) without right or permission; and (2) to get or effect surreptitiously or artfully.
Obviously, taking photos of the 100 plus pages of a magazine with a digital camera would fall well within the second category of obtaining something (in this case, the magazine material) both surreptitiously and artfully, and without right or permission. So it is qualified as theft, its just not theft that deprives the owner of the property.
Larceny (grand, petty, and petit) sets the requirements for unlawful taking or removal of anothers property with intent to permanently deprive the owner; as does burglary, though theft does has some legal definition its more of a moral term, used as the building block for other crimes.
I don't want to sound like the kill joy, laughing at everyone's book photo taking fun, but I've actually tried stuff like this. It's not hard to get away with, but I consider my time pretty valuable. That's the big reason I think this kind of behavior is just plain silly.
Do you have any idea how long it takes to copy a book this way? Not to mention that this really isn't what the cameras on the phones are meant to do, so the quality of it is going to be lousy. Wasted bandwidth storing and sending... etc. I have a hard time believing this is a serious problem anywhere.
Going out of your way to go after people who are going out of their way to do something stupid is... well... stupid.
If anyone ever got an entire 400-700 page book by taking a picture of it, I applaud them. They must have had an awful lot of time on their hands.
Isn't there some kind of award for that?
This signature has Super Cow Powers
I still think that if you take something that you haven't paid for, that is theft. That includes making a digital copy of something that you haven't purchased.
Then you're a fool. Theft is prosecuted under different laws than copyright infringement. Theft is a different word from copyright infringement. Theft involves actions completely different from copyright infringement. Finally, theft introduces a class of economic losses wholly dissimilar to those introduced by copyright infringement.
Maybe you could make the case that the two are philosophically similar, in a universal-justice kind of way, but saying that one is the other is nothing but disingenuous.
Yeah, taxes suck don't they? While you're on your anti-tax crusade could you see about the other hundreds of dollars in non-library taxes I pay for stuff I don't use or use much? For instance, Iraq. I am not using it, so why is my money being spent to obtain it?
The library doesn't allow food because, well, I think that's obvious. But they let you check books out and you're welcome to take them to the cafe with you, if you like.
They let me talk all the time. Just not in a fashion that disturbs the other patrons.
The homeless? Which library do you go to? In my town, there even seems to be some sort of "let's use the libraries as de facto homeless shelters thing going on".
If all that's evil, let's have more of it.
I do not have a signature
Shrink wrapping is credible.
So is putting them behind the counter.
For my suggest I say the charge rent for floor space. the first tent minutes free, 100 yen for every ten minute block after th first ten minutes.
you would have to get the cooperaration of all the nearby shops.
here is another one:
Sell drinks.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Man, there's a lot of it out there today!
Magazines are destroyed if they don't sell; the covers returned to the publisher for a refund. So the bookstore doesn't lose a dime, unlike if an actual product was stolen. As such, this IS not the same as shoplifting. The only money being 'lost' is that of a potential sale, which probably wouldn't happen anyway, since the 'thief' is clearly not concerned with the content of the article, (since you can't hope to read comprehensive text from a 120 x 120 dpi JPG image.)
As for the publisher, point of purchase sales, except in the cases of maybe the 5 or 6 leading magaaines, don't account for ANY significant amount of income. The publishers make virtually ALL their money from the advertisers. So they have no reason to care! --Heck, the simple fact that ANYBODY is bothering to leaf through their rag looking for pictures of dresses to scan, should make them happy.
All in all, this sounds like just another dumb excuse to clamp down on society with ever-increasing thumbscrews of social control.
Thank goodness people are wise enough to impeach stupid and dangerous leaders.
-FL
For the love of god, we're not disagreeing with you. I'll keep this short:
Stuffing a CD under your shirt and walking out of the store without paying for it is stealing and it is wrong.
Downloading a song off the internet is copyright infringement, and it is wrong. But it is not stealing.
Stealing is worse than copyright infringement.
But copyright infringement is still wrong.
Are we all in agreement on these points? Good. Then this thread can end.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again