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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?"
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.
At first I thought, "No, wait, maybe he's talking about computer ownership in Japan..." but I see that's not statistically different from US/Aus either:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users (there's no direct computer ownership listing)
On a side note, there are certainly several countries where many people who have access to computers and the net don't have their OWN computers; making use of large 'net cafe' industries instead - Brazil, Portugal and the Phillipines, for instance. This would play havoc with the idea of restricting the syncing of ONE device to only ONE computer, and requiring a device to be wiped if it syncs with another comp, a la Apple.
I live in Portugal and never heard of a "large "net cafe" industry around here. Most people access net from home, school or the office.
He's probably thinking as a tourist. All tourist places tend to have plenty of net cafes. Not to cater for locals, but to cater for the tourists.
When I last visited a tourist trap in Portugal, there was plenty of net cafes there, but they are probably very rare outside the tourist areas.
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...