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Japanese Supreme Court Rules TV Forwarding Illegal
eldavojohn writes "If you use anything like a Slingbox in Japan, you may be dismayed to find out that a Japanese maker of a similar service has been successfully sued by Japan Broadcasting Corp. and five Tokyo-based local TV broadcasting firms under copyright violations for empowering users to do similar things. TV forwarding or place shifting is recording and/or moving your normal TV signal from its intended living room box to your home computer or anywhere on the internet. Turns out that Japan's Supreme Court overruled lower court decisions confirming fears that to even facilitate this functionality is a copyright infringement on the work that is being transferred."
This ruling is ridiculous. Once a signal is openly broadcast why do the content providers think they can limit how you view the content?
is that illegal too? if so how long does it have to be 5m
10m 100m?
i don't know how you make a rule like this without it
being capricious and arbitrary. but then again ianajl
Good. The faster they wean the slobbering masses off of TV, the better. It's fast getting to the point where not even the dumbest of the dumb will have the patience to watch huge slices of commercials sandwiched between product-placement "shows".
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
Stupid. At this rate, you won't be allowed to take water out of your house without paying a tax to the water company.
This is designed to prevent anime fansubbers from capturing raw broadcasts, subtitling them, and distributing them in the US and Europe before there are licensing deals (which are now negotiated after first run in Japan based on popularity there, and most shows aren't licensed) to protect the sales of DVDs and Blu-Rays.
It's bullshit.
why do lawyers believe they can stop the march of technological progress?
it didn't work with the printing press, and it didn't work with every other media advance since
why do some fools continue to believe it will stopped now, or ever?
technological progress trumps law. always. deal with it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is actually good news. Anything that helps further the demise of television is a good thing.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
This is even more bizarre in the context of it being about Japanese TV. Most of what I see when I am there are eating (not cooking) shows, odd game shows, and infomercials. And news.
So by this logic, using a longer cable to transmit the signal is also a copyright violation! They better regulate the maximum allowable cable lengths as well!
Fear is the mind killer.
Are they pissed you aren't buying another TV Provider's box?
This is the same country that, due to special interest groups, made it illegal to rent video games or consoles while leaving it perfectly legal to do the same with other types of media including dvds and music cds. This includes "selling" those video games for a week or two with the agreed upon idea of "buying it back" a week later for 10 dollars less than the original price.
So yeah, that's probably why they're doing it.
So by this logic, using a longer cable to transmit the signal is also a copyright violation! They better regulate the maximum allowable cable lengths as well!
No, there's not a lot of material here but I think it has more to do with converting or capturing the signal to a framed encoding and then viewing this on a device unintended. There's the obvious facilitation of digital recording (like your own DVR) and redistribution or broadcasting to unintended individuals.
... looks like Slingbox's strategy is not valid in Japan.
Basically I think it comes down to a problem with locked down system to potentially open system. The new technology could potentially facilitate this.
Remember, early on Slingbox and Tivo faced these same questionable legal issues
My work here is dung.
I see what they're saying, but it doesn't make any sense.
Welcome to every bit of Japanese Culture, EVER.
Does this mean Sony are going to remove the Remote Play capability from the PS3 now?
It will transcode video from PlayTV (the freeview tv tuner for ps3) either live or from your library, it will also transcode video from your UPNP media shares and serve it up to the PSP system.
Great for watching TV as you wander around the house. It can also send it over the intarweb to your psp wherever it is. The PSP can turn the PS3 system on remotely too.
Looks like the issue is a commercial entity providing the space-shifting service. This isn't an individual setting up his own DVR and using a VPN to watch recorded shows. This case involves a company acting as a proxy for the individual, hoping that the following claim will protect them -
.
Having not seen actual court documents, I'm inclined to think that the third-party service is the real issue. Oh, and that pesky part about the media cartels not getting a cut.
Are they pissed about the possibility of the stream ending up online?
Yes. This is basically the thing. But its better to have somewhat more context: we are talking about a country with amazingly fast internet connection. Neigbourghoods are in esence connected with what we call "ethernet speed" so it's not uninimaginable that some guy buys such device and feeds his pay-per-view stream to his building's router, effectively allowing all their neigbourghs to view tv for free (or just imagine a college building the day of superbowl or victoria's secret show...).
What's going on here?
They want you to pay them before "shifting."
Palm trees and 8
Reading the secondary link, instead of the one linked to in the article, says something different:
This has nothing to do with Slingbox which, as I understand, is not a service provided by a 3rd party but a device and software you use and set up yourself. The Nikkei article linked reads as follows:
So a 3rd party firm was effectively redistributing the broadcasts and charging for the service. While I don't believe this should be a problem (charging for routing of free to broadcast programming including the advertising,) I can see where the problem comes in.
Services like Slingbox are likely immune as they are effectively a private circuit. I suspect that Sony sells both ends of the streaming hardware to end-users and said device was not the subject of this suit.
All sounds kinda "shifty" to me.
Is it illegal to use the devices or is it illegal to sell the devices? The former is virtually impossible to prove.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I'm going to take a devil's advocate approach here. You've subscribed to a service and signed some sort of contract. That contract probably stated that you can use the service in a certain predescribed manner. If you use it in any other manner, you are probably in breach of that contract. If you don't like the terms of that contract, there are many different legal options including choosing no options and obtaining televisions shows ad-hoc across the internet for a small fee.
If your cable provider wanted to actually make a few bucks, maybe they'd provide an authenticated way to access your service via the internet... but that would make way too much sense.
What's the surprise? Broadcasters and Movie-producers are still p@ssed that consumers can record analog signals ... I reckon with today's lobbying, they'd probably be able to get VCRs outlawed ...
Mark my words.
Once they get rid of the old competition (e.i TV) you'll get:
-Gobs of commercials.
-demands for your personal info BEFORE you get to watch anything
-Demand proof that you are from where you are
-Etc.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
A slight exaggeration. Japan's "amazing" speed is only 18.5 Mbit/s average. This compares with the U.S. average of 10.5* and EU average of 9.5 Mbit/s.
*
* US was once 8.5 Mbit/s, so speeds have increased over the last two years.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
...since any moron could point an IP camera at a TV screen and send the signal over the internet to anywhere the observer wants to be. This for sure is already being done unintentionally with security cameras installed in areas like airpot terminals or sports bars where TV screens are everywhere.
Is that to say running tv media servers that stream something you are watching on tv to some clients that may be connected to your server is illegal as well?
I'm curious, just when was the golden age of television? I seem to recall plenty of ignorant shows during my youth such as The Lone Ranger, Gilligan's Island, The Love Boat. If anything, some of the more recent sci-fi like stargate, and battlestar galactica, are much better than anything 30 years ago.
so does this also mean that VHS is now illegal in japan?
Windows supports this functionality. Is Microsoft going to get sued?
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Share-your-media-in-Windows-Media-Player-with-other-people-or-devices
I was going to list other shows... but I realized that I only need to start and stop with Jersey Shore. Reality television is a cheap alternative to actually having to write a script or put any work in except for sitting there with a camera. The only really good shows are on Showtime: Dexter, Weeds, etc.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but how could it possibly be illegal to "shift" a TV broadcast from one room to another? Are they pissed you aren't buying another TV Provider's box? Are they pissed about the possibility of the stream ending up online? What's going on here?
I see what they're saying, but it doesn't make any sense. Insert the sound of an adult talking in a Peanuts cartoon here.
This sort of idiocy isn't new - there was a giant clusterfuck of lawsuits when the VCR was first released that led to the media companies getting spanked. Now, they're apparently hell-bent on re-litigating it all, with the words "on a computer" added.
As opposed to some other countries where special interest groups made it OK to rent video games and consoles, but NOT okay to rent music CDs.
True story: a branch of a Japanese retail chain opened a store in my town in the US. Being the thing they do back home, they had Japanese music CDs for rent. Mind you, this was in the days before CD copying existed so it was not like you could make a perfect copy unless you had a DAT drive, which almost nobody did. And then the tapes for that would cost more than the CD. So basically CD copying didn't happen.
But the store was eventually found by the US music licensing companies (ASCAP, etc) and C&D'd over this practice of renting CDs. Apparently it's not allowed in the US, which may explain why I've never seen any other place in the US do it.
But I don't understand why. You can rent DVDs. You can rent video games. You can even borrow CDs from the public library. But you can't rent them.
This type of attitude will lead to the death of the Japanese language and culture because it makes it almost impossible for overseas Japanese to pass on their language and culture to their children. The same thing will happen in other countries that try to do the same. A country that wants its language and culture to survive and compete against the English and Chinese languages will need to remove barriers to distributing their cultural and linguistic content.
If a university student is trying to decide whether to learn Japanese or another language, the easy and free availability of TV programs and films is an important factor, because it is becoming more widely known that watching foreign language TV greatly speeds up language learning and can lead to near fluency in only two to three years.
So, almost double the speed on average of everybody else. "Amazing". I can see why you're not impressed.
It only doesn't make sense from a distance, or to those without imagination. It's easy to see how the legend of the Kappa could have grown out of someone in denial about loving violent buttsex.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Turns out that Japan's Supreme Court overruled lower court decisions confirming fears that to even facilitate this functionality is a copyright infringement on the work that is being transferred.
Does this mean that Japanese PCs can have either a TV-Tuner-Card or a Remote-Desktop-Server, but not both?
If so, I guess this makes every "Media Center" PC w/ an Ethernet port illegal.
Sounds like a new app will be hitting the Jailbroken Apple TV soon.
In other news: The MPAA has successfully sued every ISP for billions of dollars in copyright violations. Turns out, Every Internet packet is copied each time it traverses a router between you and the content provider. ASCAP says it plans to sue RAM manufacturers; During the "performance" of any song via computer with storage device, an unlicensed verbatim copy must be made into RAM.
(Hint: If copyrights are so resistant to reform then simply outlaw the Internet and Computers -- Their fundamental designs can not comply with current copyright laws.)
When I was there I was getting 100Mbps fiber for LESS than 5Mbps cost me here in the US. And that was fiber in the Japanese countryside vs cable modem in the Los Angeles suburbs so no BS arguments about "the US is so damn big".
I'd take the Japanese internet system over the US one every day of the week. And don't get me started about Japanese health care......
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
It's called the Ouroborus, and its a snake swallowing its own tail. Watching modern business, cannibalizing itself in the misguided hope of squeezing the last frigging cent, yen, drachma, or peso out of a product, service, or piece of IP is like watching the Ouroborus make a lunch of itself, happily munching away until that last mouthful slips quietly into some parallel dimension (I'm guessing hell, but at least some kind of mindless oblivion.) Sony Legal stomps on Sony music so it can maintain a deathgrip on the IP of recording artists, the RIAA consumes its own customers, and makes a public campaign of lies about why its failing to sell records, its a bunch of hypertestosteronal primates thinking they can kill and threaten their way to controlling every aspect of what people see, think and hear, and a neofascist government (both in Japan and the U.S.) which knee-jerkingly gives these crime bosses anything they ask for. The system is broken. Information (like art for instance) flows like water and as long as people can watch someone on a street corner playing beautiful music, the big guys at the media conglomerates are threatened. Personally I'm tired and nauseous of the cookie cutter clone artists being pumped out of the product packaging wombs of the big media producers. In the 60s and 70s, we got female artists ranging every depth and breadth of sound, body type, color, style, flavor, and sophistication from the ragged edge of self destruction blues pouring out of Janis Joplin, to the cool jazz pop of Joni Michell's "Free Man in Paris". None of these women looked like Vogue models, there were real, and deep, and sexy, and dangerously smart. Look at the selection of prepackaged, flavorless, flawless, lifeless female artists that perform today. The only female artist I'm hearing on the popular radio today that I'm still certain has a pulse and not a set of EveReady(tm) batteries, is Pink.
The big guys running the studios are so busy defending proprietary turf, and massaging those big stiff egos, that they can't admit they're strangling the newborn future in its cradle. Right or wrong (mostly wrong) they are willing to ride those egos all the way to bankruptcy and oblivion, while the internet makes possible a new and profound democratization of artistic expression the likes of which has never before been seen. New business people will grow up in the place of suicidal giants. Young intelligent men and women who can see the opportunity, and a business model that will generate amazing new fortunes will fill the vacuum, and we'll all remember when the snake swallowed its tail and went out in a last rage filled cry. To quote Mrs. Gump "Forrest, stupid is as stupid does!"
Because they can. Its their content, they can have any rule they want attached to it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Japan has countryside? I figured it would be all urban... or close to it... due to the high population density. For example: Most of the I95 corridor from Boston to Richmond is considered "urban" and I suspect most of Japan is too.
As for the size of the US it makes a lot more sense to compare it to other continent-spanning federations, rather than a tiny island. When you do that, the US is in second place after Russia. It is ahead of the European Union, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, and China.
FREE magazine : http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prior/
So no more fansubs either?
I've driven 95 from Boston to Richmond. Do you have a source, I mean it's been a half dozen years but I remember it mainly skirting cities and being either countryside or sub-urban for the majority of the ride.
I prefer being lazy and shiftless...
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
I use them all the time to space-shift copyrighted works.
Warning to tourists in Tokyo - don't photograph that billboard!
Oh wait, warning to Japanese camera manufacturers: Your domestic market just became illegal.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You know, I would actually be willing to pay for a Japanese TV package via internet stream if it were available at a decent price. Unfortunately, the only IPTV I've seen has been offered by dubious SE asian sources at either terrible stream qualities, or at outrageous prices. (Standard 15 channels they offer on cable over there for like $100/month, for ex) Depending on the American cable provider, they have some premium packages -- but they also tend to only be like NHK and 1-2 other channels for like $50/month...
According to NHK news the other day, the key to the ruling was that this particular service was being recast to an "indeterminate number of viewers", and that that constituted copyright violation.
The "indeterminate number" concept shows up often in Japanese law and thought, enough so that they have a single compound word for it ("futokteitasu"). It often makes a big deal of a difference for a given question whether some factor is of an "indeterminate number" or not.
I am not familiar with the details of the service in question for this case, but according to the ruling alone, one can only assume that it was not the standard space-shifting service, where the subscriber in effect pays to have a single recorder installed in Japan for them to access from overseas, as that would arguably not involve an "indeterminate number" of viewers for the content, but specific individuals, one per recorder.
However the news was very clear in pointing out, repeatedly, that this particular service had been judged to be taking broadcast content and redistributing it to an indeterminate number of viewers. That would mean this is not as sweeping a ruling as it would appear.
they tried this in the usa and failed rember tivo, so no worry abought that stupid law making its way hear. but someone sais its not abought devices like a tivo but country blocks witch video providers have been doing for a wile.
Yes, Japan has lots of non-urban land. 66% is forested. 14% is cultivated. There's a lot of mountains.
Japan has some highly urbanized areas like the Tokyo/Kanagawa/Chiba conurb which holds about 30 million people. But 30 to 60 minutes on the train will get you amongst the trees. The difference between North America and Japan is population density. In NA most people live on large lots in sprawling suburbs. Consequently, huge amounts of land is reserved for roadways and parking. In Tokyo, most people live in apartment buildings or on very small lots. Roads are narrow (often barely a car's width) and in central Tokyo it is common for an apartment building to have no car parks.
Consequently, urban land use is highly optimized towards people rather than cars in Japan. This is either a bug or a feature depending on your point of view. In my opinion, high density urban zones are probably better ecologically but more fragile in disasters. When the big one hits Tokyo it isn't going to be pretty...
a business opportunity!
My J-wife uses IP streamed 1-seg with a USB decoder.
The only alternative where I live is to get a satellite TV "Asian" package with a bunch of Chinese channels and *one* J-channel for like US$40/month.
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If I'm legally receiving a TV signal on my TV in my living room, I'll view that digital stream ANYWHERE in my house and the law isn't going to do a FUCKING thing about it. I wouldn't post it on the Internet or save it... that would be illegal.... But I'll watch it WHEREVER I want; even on a computer. NOBODY can force me to watch it on the intended TV connected to the box in my living room. GET SERIOUS!
... all the manga and animé I can stand whenever I want it off of the web.
How inconsistent these silly humans are.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Plus Hulu+ has the potential to eliminate a lot of ads by making us pay directly and negotiate directly with producers to bring shows to the public.
They're not quite up to a la carte pricing but they could do it.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Renting records used to be semi-common in the US. That kind of business became rare because of problems managing and replacing damaged inventory more than copyright issues.
FYI Japanese copyright law treats software differently than music which is in turn different than moving pictures which is in turn different from photography or other "fixed" image art forms, etc. In the early days of gaming here it was not clear which category games might be classified under and thus whether or not rental would be legal. The more you know...
I don't know the why-why, but there's a specific paragraph for phonorecords and computer software.
(A) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a), unless authorized by the owners of copyright in the sound recording (...) neither the owner of a particular phonorecord (nor ...) may, for the purposes of direct or indirect commercial advantage, dispose of, or authorize the disposal of, the possession of that phonorecord (...) by rental, lease, or lending (...).
Seems to me like a bought special interest law, but by now a fairly old and established one...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"Tokyo" (or more accurately Kanto) is basically heavily built up around the main train lines - the further out you go and the smaller the area that is build up around the train lines. I live out literally in the middle of Chiba and its only a 10minute drive out into areas of cultivated fields and densely forested unused land. Even in Tokyo proper you can head out east and there is still land that is empty or undeveloped. What is very annoying is the Japan's fibre rollout is faaar from complete and there are still many built up urban areas that do not yet have access to fibre. My own house only got it 3 years ago, and living in Saitama in 2006 I had to wait 6 months for demand to increase (which might have happened because I door knocked and got people to register interest once they found it thats the only reason why it wasn't available). "100mbit" really equates to about 60mbit on a good day, and using the craptastic "home gateway" my ISP provides is less than 30mbit.
The US Census Bureau bureau designates the entire Boston-to-Richmond I95 corridor as "urban" due to the population density along the route, with just a small gap between DC and Richmond that they expect to fill-in soon. Statisticians have even invented a name for the feature: Megalopolis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
"what is very annoying is the Japan's fibre rollout is faaar from complete and there are still many built up urban areas that do not yet have access to fibre."
LOL! I live in America now. What is this fibre thing you speak of??? I don't think we've even STARTED a fibre roll out....
lmao.
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
In case anyone gets confused trying to figure out which word the above poster intended, it's futokuteitasuu (fu non + tokutei specific + tasuu large number). (I'm doubling the u here, since I don't think macrons work on Slashdot, and macrons to indicate long vowels suck anyway.)