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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.
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.
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.
In what way will this provide _ANY_ benefit to legitimate users? They can already play their music, so they will see no benefit from having to 'phone home' to verify that they can, and will see significant risks of being incorrectly refused the right to play music they've been given or paid for.
Users can only suffer from this nonsense, because they can only be denied the right to do what they've been doing up until now.
In what way will this provide _ANY_ benefit to legitimate users?
More music sellers will be willing to provide music through such a system, making the available amount of music larger as a whole. (Kinda like how the vast majority of legitimate paying mobile application developers have flocked to the iphone, where the largest successful DRM implementation is)
I'm not saying I at all agree with this plan, i'm simply answering your question.
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
"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!
Bullcrap. Your premise is all up the creek. Telecom companies are not going to upgrade their infrastructure just because the music industry wants DRM everywhere. This has never happened in the past and it will not happen in the future. You're basically saying that the only reason that Telecoms are going to upgrade their networks is because they have deliberately increased the traffic themselves, not because of demand?!?!?
If this technology is getting implemented invisibly then why did it make front page news on slashdot?? Phail. Not even Echelon has been implemented invisibly.
Are you really telling us that because some people download pirated material we are not going to get any service upgrades? If not then why do you equate having phones without DRM with a free life in squalor?
Lastly, why on earth do you think that this isn't going to cause problems? DRM has caused major disruptions everywhere else it has been implemented. Do you think the Japs have the miracle fix for DRM that the rest of the world has been missing?
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.
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