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Japan's Cell Phones May Get DRM, At Music Industry Behest
An anonymous reader writes "The Japanese Music Industry is currently in talks with Japanese cell phone providers to introduce a new anti-piracy system in all cell phones in Japan. This new system would make DRM software mandatory in all cell phones; this would connect to a DRM server on the Internet whenever the cell phone user would try to play a song. The song would only play if the response of the server would be positive. Otherwise no song would be played. The system raises several questions and concerns that the Financial Times article did not address. These include ripped legally bought music and music that has been released under a CC license or similar. Who would pay for the costs of the DRM checks, and what would happen if no connection could be established?"
you think that some global company would rather "decrease their profits and shareholder value"?
Defective by design, as usual. I'm sure firmware hacks/mods will be created if this were to be implemented on a wide scale. No worries, really.
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
the skillz market for hacking phones just went up again. when will these music industries/RIAJ/RIAA/etc ever learn from Amazon/Ebay/etc? Its all about customer experience. This may be the same reason why top100 music generally licks balls.
my 2 cents.
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
If the DRM system checks all songs against a server, regardless of origin, people will just end up using previous generation phones, or paying for a third party for a custom flash ROM to bypass this.
If the DRM system only checks flagged songs, I'm sure another black market will pop up allowing songs to be downloaded from somewhere, likely offshore.
Either way, Japan's analog of the RIAA loses long term for gains made in the short term. One can watch the lessons of DRM in the US, from the SDMI specs to FairPlay, to Apple just chucking DRM altogether to see what potholes are in store.
Iam sure the RIAA will pay my internet connection charges or atleast the provider will make it free.
If not, am filing a suit on using my money illegally without my permission.
I will file the case against the provider, they are ones who connect my phone to 'net.
If many people file, am sure they will either stop helping RIAA or bill them.
If not, an legally obliged to defend my property against unauthorized assaults.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
There isn't likely going to be any fallout whatsoever from this. The technology will go into place, be pretty much invisible, and provide enough benefits for legitimate users that no one will cry except for people who aren't connected in any way to Japan.
This is the way technology works. It gets implemented invisibly and no one ever knows they lost any sort of freedoms. In fact, they gain all sorts of benefits like better quality samples and higher bandwidth to support the increased usage.
In the U.S., it's pretty much the other way around. You can load up your phone with all sorts of pirated music and software, but the tradeoff is that the carriers don't give a damn about bandwidth or quality of service since they didn't plan on the increased traffic in the first place.
Do you take the red pill and live in a gilded cage, or do you take the blue pill and live a free life in squalor?
What if you're on the subway and you want to play a song? You know, like 75% of all people do everyday on their way to and from work.
Japan. Recording Industry Association of America. What do they teach these days in school?
What if I record something myself using the "voice recorder" function and want to play it? Will that have to be run by the RIAA first? Will I be forbidden from exchanging my own recordings (of my baby laughing or whatever) with my friends?
If not, then surely someone will make a simple scrubber app that makes an MP3 look to the phone like a user-recorded sound.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
I am more surprised that this isn't already the case. I lived in Japan for several years and owned a few au phones. My first year I had a low end au phone and the two years after I had a higher end Casio. The higher end had some great features - good camera, 1seg TV, Japanese/English dictionary etc., but it was locked down to all hell. I couldn't even get my own ringtones on it, let alone MP3s or apps. As much as I wanted to customize my phone and not pay through the nose for approved stuff, I could do nothing.
Feature-wise my current Blackberry Curve is way behind my au phone, but I can at least use it's Bluetooth to connect to my laptop and use my own MP3s as ringtones.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
"Who would pay for the costs of the DRM checks, and what would happen if no connection could be established?"
If anything the last decade has taught us about the modus operandi of music industries is that they simply dont care and want their dollars. Who would pick up the tab for the check? The phone user. What would happen if there was no connection? No music.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
All these hypothetical examples are beside the point. If the music industry wants this implemented, it will likely happen.
But even so, it won't work. Japan's music industry is even more moribund than the US industry. It got fat and comfortable charging for singles the equivalent of what US consumers charge for albums, and for albums, the equivalent of US$30 or more. Meanwhile it pushes the same arthritic set of superstars that have dominated their pop scene for 10, 15, 20 years or more. The end result is that the cost of entry for unknown acts is too high, new music suffers. Japanese consumers have grown accustomed to buying albums used and ripping them. Locking mobiles will just increase the sales of walkmans and ipods and will make it more of a no-brainer to circumvent DRM'ed music.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
I't not just the legally purchased music that I can legally put on my ipod now - and will likely want to put on my new phone to minimise the number of devices I carry. Bad though that is, this is much nastier. For instance, one of my friends plays in an amateur band. He gives us MP3s of their material - in fact the 10 or so of us that get given this are probably the entirety of their regular audience. They do it for love and the delight that people are listening to their stuff - for the same reason they put cliups on youtube. Under this silly scheme, even the copyright owner couldn't listen to their own stuff on their own phone!
I remember living in Okinawa back in 1993, JASRAC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JASRAC cracked down (and again in 2006) on club owners that played pre-recorded music at bars and nightclubs and profited by selling drinks and food to customers. Some clubs faced retroactive fines in the tens of thousands of Yen and were forced to close down. Just outside the gate near Kadena was the 'A-Sign Sound Bar' that used to play requests, the entire side of an album, man those were good times. Ah, the good old days: Okinawa and lots of Orion beer.
They wouldn't be using your money without your permission, by trying to play the song you'd be giving them permission. At least that's how their lawyers would probably argue it.
That would be a phone I would never buy.
GP assumes too much I think. The prices on fragmented and assward mobile markets (like in US and to some extent EU) do not compare to what people in Japan experience. Most likely the japanese boys and girls would not have noticed a difference (except maybe that some music would not play). This of course does not make the bandwidth stealing in any way correct and the whole process good. That the whole thing is unethical and wrong will not stop anybody of course.
"and what would happen if no connection could be established?"
OMG! I think I know the answer! There'd be no music! And then what would happen?!
Um - I don't know, what would happen if someone couldn't hear music the instant they wanted to?
Brain damage maybe...
Really? The DRM is being installed at the music industry's behest? You mean end consumers aren't clamoring for this? But the media industry keeps telling me how DRM is better for customers!
Not much, but he feels good about it.
I'm increasingly glad that my Palm Tungsten E2 with its pathetic little 1G SD card is still my main source of music and e-reading when I'm out and about. I've got 90 songs (all at CD quality), 31 novels, and a bunch of pdf's and Office files, and a few games. And NO DRM! Yes, I shift songs in and out, so I don't have access to every song I ever listened to. So what? I use this stuff to pass time when I'm on public transit and sitting in waiting rooms, not when I'm in an environment where I want to kick back, get comfortable, and give the music and stories the attention the artists who made them really deserve.
Sometimes, I think, cutting edge isn't always the best. When this thing finally dies (it's about 4 years old), I'm going to get another one. I got it because it runs Office files and Outlook and do all the usual business stuff, and you can actually scrawl notes on it. More and more, though, I find the worry-free entertainment is what I'm using.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The like consequences would be:
a) Slowdown in sales of new handsets.
b) Bigger use of independent mp3 players
c) Growth of the second-hand handsets market.
d) Growth of Internet buys of foreign-made handsets.
All in all, a bad thing for Japanese handset makers
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Enough of this bullshit. Off with their heads!
This may be a response to the growing popularity of the iPhone in Japan. There's an increasing number of people who download mp3s or buy DRM-free music from sites like http://www.hearjapan.com/, and this is cutting into the profitable cell phone mp3 market.
ha-ha!
How will they perform those checks on amateurish works ? And derivative works ? "åOEä" (Doujin) musics regroup a lot of derivative and original works so a bad move would mean getting a lot of customers angry.
What if I recorded my own music and want to play that? Or any other legaly downloaded free music (or speech or whatever.) Most likely it will say something like: Unknown, so OK to play. That would mean that suddenly ALL the music will get such a signal.
Either that or they will only allow cellphones to play OK downloaded songs. That would mean that people will find another solution. Can you say mp3 player?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
particularly those that make sure they are completely open source and hackable? It's just going die when it meets the G1 and the other android phones. Even to the point of having to load alternitive firmware, enough people will be able to do it that it will make a mockery of the law.
Some clubs faced retroactive fines in the tens of thousands of Yen and were forced to close down.
To be a bit picky you either meant "club were forced down [independently of the money fine]" or you meant "fines in the 10 of thousand dollar", because 10000 1993 Yen are what, 90$ ? There is a conversion factor for those year of 120 Y to 110 Y to 1 $.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
If you are translating into English, you use an English word your readers will understand.
What a depressing pandering to ignorance. What's wrong finding out who is involved and what they are? You know, actually stepping outside your insular little bubble and learning something new? Pinning this on the usual boogeyman is just lazy and dishonest.
By your logic, when the Japanese Prime Minister does something Slashdot readers should be told in translation what "Barack Obama" is up to in Japan. After all, who knows or recognises Taro Aso? Who cares they are completely different people?
Why stop there? I'm not sure about this "Japan", best translate it as "Hawaii".
This is just so they can get the infrastructure in place for per-play or per-minute music charging. It would be trivial to hook this server up to the phone companies billing system to bill users every time they played a song.
The next step is then to provide addons to contracts offering "unlimited" songs, for only an additional $15 per month...
>Japan. Recording Industry Association of *America*.
Same arseholes, different toilet.
We still get shat upon.
Questions?
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
This is just dumb. If my mobile provider started to pull this kind of crap, I'd get an mp3 player. It's nice being able to play music on my phone, but it sure isn't essential.
http://ihatehate.wordpress.com
AC + late so no fucker will ever read it but......
Has anyone mentioned that in these days of phones shipping with several gigs of storage, or the capacity to add said storage, that this piece of legislation would once again give people a compelling reason to own both a cell phone and an MP3 player, both of which japan "makes" a significant fraction of.
lets not for get who is actually behind the MPAA - RIAA, these are the companies that need to be targeted and boycotted into changing their ways, purchase only 2nd hand media, & avoid all sony products as much as possible, why allow these scum suits to dictate hardware/software DRM anymore.
... So how it works is that SoundExchange collects money through compulsory royalties from Webcasters and holds onto the money. If a label or artist wants their share of the money, they must become a member of SoundExchange and pay a fee to collect their royalties.'"
Name and shame the companies as all the **AA trade group name is for is to protect the corporate globalists gatekeepers from bad press.
RIAA, CRIA, SOUNDEXCHANGE, BPI, IFPI, Ect:
# Sony BMG Music Entertainment
# Warner Music Group
# Universal Music Group
# EMI
MPAA, MPA, FACT, AFACT, Ect:
# Sony Pictures
# Warner Bros. (Time Warner)
# Universal Studios (NBC Universal)
# The Walt Disney Company
# 20th Century Fox (News Corporation)
# Paramount Pictures Viacom--(DreamWorks owners since February 2006)
========
If Sony payola (google it) wasn't already bad enough to destroy all indie competition already you have this scam.
Is it justified to steal from thieves? READ ON.
RIAA Claims Ownership of All Artist Royalties For Internet Radio
http://slashdot.org/articles/07/04/29/0335224.shtml
"With the furor over the impending rate hike for Internet radio stations, wouldn't a good solution be for streaming internet stations to simply not play RIAA-affiliated labels' music and focus on independent artists? Sounds good, except that the RIAA's affiliate organization SoundExchange claims it has the right to collect royalties for any artist, no matter if they have signed with an RIAA label or not. 'SoundExchange (the RIAA) considers any digital performance of a song as falling under their compulsory license. If any artist records a song, SoundExchange has the right to collect royalties for its performance on Internet radio. Artists can offer to download their music for free, but they cannot offer their songs to Internet radio for free
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/4/24/141326/870
The Truth Is Out There:
Most young girls will not realize or care about this I expect.
But to put this in perspective, yesterday I saw a tasty-looking home NAS on the shelf of a store in Akihabara, Tokyo. The high end model, which among other things has some terabytes of RAID and a mysql server in it, can download bittorrent without having a pc connected to it.
I figure people will put music or video on their home-NAS, and maybe if it can be made easy even share the NAS with a bunch of friends. Then just stream to your phone. Encoding for normal phones, and accessing from them, might be a pain. But I expect the more advanced phones will be able to work great with them. So if you move the media off the phone, then you can stream from a home NAS. Everything has SD or microSD in them now too. Will the DRM cover that too?
Remember the Sony statements from 2000: ""The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams... It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user."
In 2005, Sony came out with their rootkit. This was met with less-than-wild enthusiasm (plus a few lawsuits).
So in 2009, the industry takes a new approach: owning your cellphone.
This will continue until they have either (a) gotten the technology through one way or another or (b) pissed their customers off enough to put themselves out of business. Sadly, given pliant politicians, the odds favor (a).
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Don't buy and put music on a cell phone. Live more simply, save money, let the a-holes who are so worried about losing a few bucks to song piracy have their business model turn to dust in their collective mouths!
For a technical audience like /. this kind of crap is obviously going to fail on a dozen of levels; but those fucktards keep pushing this nonsense, and they probably even believe it. Without even thinking very hard,
But that won't stop that merry band of fucktards.
Tomorrow, Sarkozy's merry band of obedient scumsuckers is going to vote on the Hadopi law v2, which is equally absurd.
By your logic, when the Japanese Prime Minister does something Slashdot readers should be told in translation what "Barack Obama" is up to in Japan. After all, who knows or recognises Taro Aso? Who cares they are completely different people?
Lots of people recognize the name of Taro Aso. But he is not the Prime Minister of Japan.
This might be a little over the top, but pretty much all phones, except for hardcore smartphones running "outsider" software platforms like Palm and Windows Mobile (yes, it sounds odd to put Windows anything in that category, but fair's fair) are heavily restricted and locked down in one way or another. That includes the iPhone, and even Android: one of the advantages of Android over OpenMoko to the cellphone companies and carriers was that it let them maintain some of that lock-in.
So, your cellphone company and mobile provider are already pulling that kind of crap, albeit in areas you apparently don't notice or care about.
Having this system in place will make sellers willing to provide more music. Because there is lots of popular music that HASN'T been ripped into downloadable form. FInally, the long song drought is OVER!
Is Data free over there? if not then this may cost a lot?
I can't see this working over hear as data and text cost a lot and some people have to block texts as they get billed for incoming and how about if you are roaming? hello big data bill.
Just thing about how many i-phone uses will be hit will big roaming bill if they where to try to play music out side of the usa.
A word that means the same thing, fine. A NAME, whether of a person, place or organisation, no fucking way. That is just idiotic.
In any case, you should spell out an acronym on the first use in an article, and I think "Recording Industry Association of Japan" is pretty damn obvious.
You say he is the Japanese Prime Minister, even though Prime Minister might not be his actual title.
That's what the Japanese government calls it:
Official site of the Prime Minister of Japan and his Cabinet.
There are many prime ministers in the world. There are many "recording industry associations". The is only one "RIAA", and only one "RIAJ".
You say he is the Japanese Prime Minister, even though Prime Minister might not be his actual title.
"Prime minister" is a position in the government, not a person. Description of a position in a system like a government can reasonably be translated between languages whose speakers share a roughly similar understanding of the system.
"Taro Aso" or "RIAA", OTOH, refer to a specific person and a specific organisation, and can therefore not be 'translated' by replacing them with references to other specific people or organisations.
>>These include ripped legally bought music and music that has been released under a CC license or similar. Who would pay for the costs of the DRM checks, and what would happen if no connection could be established?"
Not to mention that big fat wadge of illegally downloaded music i have wont work, dam you DRM! (we all know this is the real reason no one likes DRM...)
*lights touch paper runs*
...to redirect all requests to yes.thepiratebay.org in 3...2...1..
Now the Japanese cell market will suck like ours here in the U.S! That'l teach them to try and do things better than us!
Fair point, but not quite. Translating titles is not the same as substituting names.
There is only one "RIAA", and only one "RIAJ".
What about the Recording Industry Association of Argentina and the Recording Industry Association of Jamaica?
Multimedia on Japanese cell phones has ALWAYS been locked down with DRM.
Travel to another country, listen to your music. Enjoy your $20000 roaming data charge.
Keep dreaming.. that will be banned too.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
For instance, one of my friends plays in an amateur band. He gives us MP3s of their material - in fact the 10 or so of us that get given this are probably the entirety of their regular audience. They do it for love and the delight that people are listening to their stuff - for the same reason they put cliups on youtube. Under this silly scheme, even the copyright owner couldn't listen to their own stuff on their own phone!
But how does he know that he owns the copyright on the song that he recorded? At least under United States copyright law, accidentally copying part of a song you heard a decade ago into your own song is infringement. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music. Or does Japanese copyright law differ noticeably in this respect?
The RIAA is not limited to America, just ask their lawyers.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
...because if the fanbois were not so eager to part with their hard-earned cash to buy DRM'ed AAC content, then actions like this could never get off the ground in the first place.
But because the fanbois have allowed themselves to be squeezed so readily, you can guarantee some other greedy corporation will squeeze them and us even more.
If you're stupid enough to by DRMed products in the first place, then prepare to lie in the bed you've made for yourselves.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
With a centralized authorization server, the industry could easily accumulate usage statistics. I'm sure they'd love that just for the sake of popularity ranking, but it opens the door to the massive privacy invasion of monitoring individuals as well.
Unless there's some sort of anonymizer, such a thing could be put to all sorts of nefarious uses. Even if all they do is profile user habits and offer others a better deal on downloads because they like popular tunes, then I'd say it's something to worry about.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
The first does not exist. The "Recording Industry Association of Jamaica Limited" uses the acronym "RIAJam" according to their website. Hope that clarifies things for you.
To save time see http://www.ifpi.org/content/section_links/national_associations.html
There you will find that the Argentines has "CAPIF - Cámara Argentina de Productores de Fonogramas y Videogramas". And before you get excited, neither Australia nor Austria's groups are "RIAA" either.
This would be a major step back from the supposed liberalizing of consumer mobile rights which MIC has suggested, previously. Perhaps a loophole to reverse the pressure on Operators to loosen their stranglehold over the consumer. Started with pressure on more transparency on the regressive subsidy schemes where lower tier users turned out to be paying more for service then the higher tier folks. Thus pressure to provide more transparency in price of service vs hardware. Subsidies ok, just users should have option of paying for hardware straight-up with a lower monthly tariff. Softbank, with Mr Son in charge, the mavericks of the market first to take steps in this direction. Note: It is commonly felt that DoCoMo and AU dislike Mr. Son(Korean heritage) for not playing along in the mobile oligarchy. This would be another step to further isolate the Japan cell phone market. Keeping out more global foreign brands. Of course, illegal music is bad and to extent can be deterred then all for it. However, in this case likely cure will be worse than the disease and hurt consumers. This has further implications on implementing another local barrier to foreign competition. The big 2 Operators cling to the same ridiculous claims as the major US Operator overlords. Operator control of mobile ecosystem in long-run provides more benefits to the consumer. Sounds like China's justification for restricting freedom of speech etc...(debatable whether true-short in some cases short run, but is it worth it?) Anticipate a more watered down approach to appease the RIAJ, while Operators and MIC as overseer maintain good faith negotiations to avoid potential claims due to not taking reasonable limits to prevent/deter piracy. PDC, i-Mode, non-std CDMA(being phased out) all examples of local barriers which supposedly protect local industry but further isolate their products and competitiveness. Curious how the DPJ will react? They promote themselves as the people party with desire to break overbearing Ministry & Industry giant links in interests of people/consumers. Though can see them siding with a more isolationist approach as well to further protect local businesses or sit passively back as they have many other challenges. Luckily this affects mostly the younger consumers who are much more tech savvy and will naturally alter music listening behavior accordingly (as also noted by others).
No doubt you'd have to agree to an EULA with your new DRM enabled phone which gives permission to connect to the server which checks you music license.