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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?'"
Subject says it all.
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.
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.
They're supposedly banning cellphones at swimming pools because of people taking pictures of kids.
Sadly that sounds pretty typical of so many modern regulations. Ban cameras at public pools and the parents will no longer be able to take photos of their kids at play. But the pedaphiles, who already have plenty of screws loose, will continue to snap pictures... either hidden camera or at a distance with a telephoto lens.
Does anyone else notice the pattern with bans?
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.
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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
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.