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Storing Personal Music Online Is Illegal In Japan
An anonymous reader writes "A decision in Tokyo District Court could have implications in Japan for online services that let users store files, if any music files are involved. The court case pitted JASRAC, the Japanese organization that collects fees for public music performances, against Image City, whose MYUTA service lets users employ a central server to store songs from their own CDs, to play on their own phones. The Tokyo District Court handed down a ruling declaring Image City guilty of copyright infringement (Google translation). Despite the music being stored strictly for personal use, the ruling reasoned that the act of uploading music to a central server owned by a company is the equivalent of distributing music to that company. This has implications for other services such as Yahoo! Briefcase and Apple's .Mac, which could mean these companies are guilty of copyright infringement if any of their users in Japan store music in their accounts for personal use. Here are some additional details on JASRAC's activities and methods." Neither article talks about possible appeals, or about how strong a precedent this case sets in the Japanese legal system.
So if you upload it to your own server this decision wouldn't necessarily apply. This brings up some interesting ideas; suppose a server farm was operated as a co-op where all the users own shares of the server farm. Now, if they upload music to this server farm are they distributing it to someone else?
How about if someone you don't know downloads a copy of a song from your server while you're not watching - is this distribution?
The record companies are setting legal precedents right and left these days - but I wonder if they realize what kind of corner they're painting themselves into. The basic idea of the copyright owner being the one who decides who gets copies of his work for a limited time is sound. I don't think even a hardened pirate can honestly argue against this. But this simple idea has been blown up and perverted far beyond what it was intended to be by greedy businessmen. The push-back from the general public is getting stronger by the day and it's just a matter of time before these companies find themselves holding the short end of the stick.
Want to hasten that day? Inform others of what's going on, and defund the crooks by refusing to purchase their products. Take the money out and they'll fold up very quickly.
(...) the ruling reasoned that the act of uploading music to a central server owned by a company is the equivalent of distributing music to that company.
Sounds a lot like a safe deposit box to me. I entrust the company with my possessions in a central location (the bank vault), but the ownership doesn't change hands. I've in no way distributed the music to the bank just because I put it in my safe deposit box, that's ridiculous. Also, that notion of "distribution" would be completely ridiculous for a company. Shared hosting? Co-lo? Rented terminal services? All of those involve uploading data to a central server owned by a different company. By no means is that distribution to whomever is doing the hosting. Also think of things like Google apps, are you distributing things to Google now whenever you use their tools? I hope the actual ruling made more sense than that sentence.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The analogy of encryption with a locked container is problematic in this case. If you encrypt something with a properly constructed one-time pad, for example, the ciphertext will be indistinguishable from a random set of bits. Is the plaintext "inside" the ciphertext somehow? Only if you say that all messages of the same length are inside the ciphertext.
Music on your keitai is big business: the cell phone providers have their own music download services, and on most phones, you do not have the ability to upload mp3s or the like yourself (there are certainly some exceptions, and I believe Vodaphone phones generally did allow you much more freedom in this regard. Vodaphone were very much the minor player in the market though.)
... as a copyright violation. With progressively higher-level manufacturing moving to China, there is strong support from the government to encourage industry to develop and invest in IP, with correspondingly strong IP laws.
Services like MYUTA threaten to undermine a very lucrative source of revenue, and the music industry is a very, very powerful lobby: Sony for example were able to have the law rewritten such that importing CDs of Japanese music that Japanese publishers had licensed to overseas companies for distribution would be illegal
Wow, I will never figure out Japan.
In Japan, it's acceptable and perfectly legal to walk into Tsutaya (i.e. the Japanese "Blockbuster"), rent an armful of CDs, rip to your heart's desire, and then return them the next day.
This reminds me of the time last year when, in the name of safety, the Japanese government tried to make it illegal to sell used electronic items.
http://www.securstar.com/products_drivecryptpp.php
That software is not open source however. but for the really paranoid a hundred and twenty five bucks is a small price to pay.
My site
This is Japan. This ruling is totally useless. First of all, the market for people who want to save their music online to listen to on their cell phones is very small indeed; "full browsing" internet time costs 300 yen (US $2.50) just to initiate, and cellphone-centric browsing is pretty pricey as well. There are all-you-can-eat plans for about 5000 yen a month, but since they make several cell phone models that are designed to be music players and offer multiple gigabytes of internal storage, not to mention swappable microSD cards, I predict the number of people living in Japan who will actually care about this ruling to total about 3.
Add on top of that the fact that Japanese law is based on the "don't ask, don't tell" school of thinking, and that music and CD rental stores not only sell blank media right by the register, but also helpfully label the CDs your renting with the play time so that you'll know how many CDs/MDs/whatever you're going to need, and I really find this hard to care about. This is, as with many landmark cases in Japan, a lot of posturing with very little follow-through.
The only place I've ever seen the Japanese remotely strict about managing is on-line images of celebrities. You want to get a take-down notice, just put up a pic of Erika Sato and see how long that lasts.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
One lovely feature of TrueCrypt is the ability to house data in separate drives both referred to by one bitstream. They call it "plausable deniability". You can put some sensitive-looking information in there with one password, which you would surrender if forced to. In the meantime you put the REAL sensitive stuff in there with a completely different password that the bad guys cannot even know exists.
No partition has to know about the other one it coexists with. The whole thing still looks like a random smattering of bits.
More Twoson than Cupertino
First, are you out of your mind? Speaking of bad logic... even comparing actual Theft (let alone copyright infringement) with murder and rape is outrageous. Murder and rape take something that can NEVER be restored.
Second, Theft actually deprives you of your personal belongings. That means you're going to have to spend more money to buy it again. Copyright infringement deprives you of potential earnings. This loss (though it is a real problem, and could ruin a person financially) is completely impossible to quantify in most cases, due to variables that are impossible to know. For example, you have no way of knowing if every person who obtained the copy of your work illegally would ever have paid for a legal copy if he could not have obtained one illegally. This does not make copyright infringement right or even OK, but it does mean that your "lost income" may well never have existed at all, and you have lost nothing.
Third, it has been shown many times in many ways that copyright infringement can actually help the author/artist by spreading his work and making it far more popular than if the copyright infringement had never occurred.
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