Slashdot Mirror
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?'"
People do obnoxious things like this (man I have been waiting to slashdot them for a while).
Don't these people know there are bookstores where you can just go in, buy a coffee, sit around and read the magazine, then put it back on the shelf and leave?
-a
Subject says it all.
If you're going to stand in a bookstore, taking 500 pictures of the latest fav-novel of your choice, and *not* get caught, then you probably deserve to get away with the pictures.
On the other hand, if someone didn't spend so much money on the cell phone to take 600 pictures of a book, they probably could.. well.. buy the book.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
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.
I suffer from lack of photographic memory, thus such devices are my aids. On a similar note, my ability to perfectly memorize movies and music is also impaired, thus I am justified in downloading MP3's and movies.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
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.
There is clearly a requirement here for some sort of DRM for printed materials. What about something like those 3D glasses they used to hand out in theaters. Make it so you can only read the magazine with those glasses on.
Might have some interesting side effects for Playboy magazine.
(This is a joke - unless you want to patent this idea. Then it is prior art.)
Bureaucracy loves company.
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
... 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."
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?
Okay, where to start:
1) magazines are insanely priced here in Japan. A general purpose one (say, equiv to cosmo) would be 700 yen (think 6 dollars). A specialty one, say an hobby related RC magazine is a whopping 1,800 yen (about 15 dollars)*
2) generally all stores you can go in and read, but you have to stand there and do it - that has never prevented hordes of people from standing by the magazine racks and browsing through everything; japanese people are usually very accustomed to be on their legs, many having to stand on the train for commute and walk between the trainstation and their destinations
3) Interestingly, the porn sections in japan are not shrinkwrapped - and I do wonder if this is where the digital shoplifting takes place more than anywhere else: while it's fine and good to look at naked ladies standing next to an obasan browsing through summer-cooking recipies, where you really want to be is the privacy of your home with such magazines (let's be realistic here). So I can imagine that being a good candidate for such "theft." Of course, the obasan next to you might be stealing recipies too, but frankly the phones don't have THAT good of resolution - text won't come out.
now - you can stand and browse magazines ANYWHERE, including convenience stores (which, coincidentally, have adult sections - so if you suddenly have an urge to see pictures of naked woman at 3am, 7-E is the place to go), but nowhere I know have sit-down drinking coffee type.
side note: the "adult section" should probably include PC games section, which, as far as I can tell, is by far occupied with hentai-themed games than anything else. But none of them is censored or in a separate area. stupid american "decency laws"
other side note: the real popular stuff, they usually shrink wrap - this include popular comics, and game-hintguides, etc...
* last note: there is no such thing as subscription, or subscription discounts in japan: you can get a subscription, but then the book seller where you get it from would just mail you the said magazines on an interval and charge you cover price plus postage (ok maybe 5% discount). silly, eh? no wonder people "steal" the content.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
People won't pay for what they don't value, and ultamatly, as technology progresses and if control of that technology stays in the hands of people, we'll begin to see new kinds of media such as people throwing up e-newspapers and instead of asking for payment, ask for donations.
The store owners are simply angry becuase an old system they've been using for years is finally beginning to fade away into obsolecence. What people are doing isn't even a crime; as far as the law is conserned you can take all the pictures you want in public in america you want. If you go into a store, it's considered rude to try to make a copy of something that way like it's rude to stand there and read the magazine in the store without buying it.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Store clerk to manager: "You know, I've been seeing photoflashes every 5 seconds for an hour." Manager: "Yes, it's that 13 year old with the cellphone and that copy of Playboy."
I live in Japan. I can't imagine that this makes any significant difference in peoples buying habits. People already spend lots of time reading magazines in 7-11 and Lawsons and similar convenience stores, with no intention of buying in the first place. I'm sure this is a natural extension of that habit. I doubt if its ever to actually steal or retain the original information. Its probably more like jotting down a note. Also, people spend lots of time holding their open phones facing outwards sending email! So, I would think its difficult to distinguish when someone's taking a picture, and when someone's just emailing their friend. Finally, I think in Japan the notion of intellectual property and the illegality of it is not as severe as it is in the states. Its more a social issue, and I can't imagine any laws developing from this, or similar IP issues.
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
While that tramp "Intellectual Property" just wants to be 0wn3d.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
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.
They'll need a whole new Orwellian pseudo-crime-name for that... I suggest "digital molestation of kittens".
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Just to clarify a few of these...
($US1 = 118 JPY, 100 JPY = $US0.84)
books / magazines
Japanese paperbacks vary between 350 and 650 yen. Hardback novels are usually 1200 to 2500 yen.
CDs / DVDs
CDs are 2000-3000 yen, although the cheap 'collections' are usually 1000-1200 yen (older artists). DVDs vary between 2500 and 7500 yen (higher end is for things like anime).
movie tickets
1500-1800 yen.
gasoline
90-100 yen per litre.
fruits
Depends where you buy, but a punnet of strawberries in season is 200-350 yen, apples are 100-200 yen each, 1Kg of oranges is 300-500 yen.
rice
Don't really know - I get all my rice from relatives (farmers).
vitamins
Dunno, don't buy them.
stationary
That's what work is for, right?
postage (delivery fee, let's say)
~80 yen for a postcard, ~100 yen for a letter. I find shipping costs worse - 5000+ yen to ship a server from one side of Tokyo to the other is a ripoff.
beer
130-150 yen for a 300ml can of 'happoshu', which is basically beer but brewed in a way which excepts it from the taxes on beer. Real beer is 200-300 yen for a 300ml can. Of course, buying in bulk reduces the cost by quite a bit.
"Cheap" stuff...
cigarettes
I don't smoke, but quite a few friends bitch that Japanese cigarettes are expensive (250-300 yen for a box of 20).
low-quality sake (rice-wine)
Not necessarily low quality; quite decent sake can be had for 1200-1800 yen for an isshobin (1.8 litre bottle).
RC parts (that are made in japan)*
Dunno...
Here in Pakistan, foreign books and magazines start at 10 dollars (no matter what the actual price) and go up to 50 dollars. Local books are priced from 5 to 25 dollars. Here, a middle class salaried person makes around a 100 dollars or less a month. He/she has to support a family. You can imagine that books are the last thing they are every going to buy. Even for the well off, buying a book is something which has to be planned in advance, budgeted, then finally bought. Since we have low literacy rates here, there isn't much local content of high quality available. Magazines are one thing, but as long as books are priced beyond your typical consumer, there is something wrong with the business model. If the costs have been covered in the first world then there should be cheaper priced editions available in the rest of the world. The problem is not that playboy is too expensive, it is that technical books and magazines are priced well beyond reason. Our govt. is too blame also as they do not do anything at all about getting books into the country, providing translations etc. Anyways my point was, over here our main source of new content is Piracy. either someone gets one copy and reprints it here, or they get a scanned copy from a agent/pirater abroad etc. etc. So the more piracy going on the more stuff we get to read. The choice isn't about pirating or buying. It's about being able to read the damn things. Pakistan has a developing IT industry, and 99% of the students don't have enough money to buy ONE copy of a typical academic book per year.
> 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
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