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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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:
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!
Travel to another country, listen to your music. Enjoy your $20000 roaming data charge.