Slashdot Mirror
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 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
My site