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Illegal Downloading Now a Crime In Japan With Increased Penalties
eldavojohn writes "Although downloading songs without paying for them in Japan used to be a civil offense starting in 2010, it is now a crime with new penalties of up to two years in prison or fines of up to two million yen ($25,700). The lobbying group behind this push for more extreme penalties is none other than the RIAJ (the Japanese RIAA). The BBC notes this applies to both music and video downloads which may put anime studios in a particularly uncomfortable position."
Isn't Japan the country whose P2P scene is dominated by darknet software like Winny and Share?
It is not worth wrecking the lives of the people involved just to boost sales of your crappy open source music.
Except that the only way for anti-piracy to "win" is to take general purpose computers out of the public's hands and move everyone into walled garden ecosystems, which would kill open source software.
For as long as people can use computers to share files, they will. The only way around that is to replace the public's computers with devices that don't run unsigned software and don't play back unlicenced media.
Agreed, Restrictions against piracy will push this a bit further to the right direction but what is worrying is that privacy should still be an value. I believe that once privacy is broken, the trust that people have in IT will drop and eventually drive them out of the internet. So yes, it is a good initiative but it might really easily backfire and break the very industry that is lobbying it.
If you think the anime studios are in a particularly uncomfortable position, you should see what happens to their characters.
Hopefully a family member of someone from the RIAJ, or maybe a politician's kid will be the first one caught.
If it can be read, it can be copied. There are means of distribution that cannot be stopped by conventional means.
At least everyone is switching to using mainly iPhones and iPads. Ohh Sh....
"people have to listen to our music"
Do you _really_ want that to be your business model? Successful not because of your ability but because someone has mandated it? I guess your artistic integrity is worth less than the bottom line. You'll fit in fine with the *IAA then.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
I knew the first post was you, but posting an AC reply with "quite frankly" in it makes it even more obviously. You're basically a bit for the RIAA and/or companies that think exactly like them.
Are you trying to suggest that Mac users don't pirate, or that there aren't a lot of Mac users out there? You are insane.
which is totally what she said
I guess one is supposed to be pro-piracy around here, but I am OK with piracy being reduced. If the artist(s) want a monetary compensation for their works, it's a fair deal. Of course if they set a price too high or make a crappy product, it's also fair for me to not buy it. But it's not a excuse to download it for free... Unless the producers choose so. For example if the anime studios feel that piracy has helped them, then why not just put up some free clips online in the future, by your own.
boycott. don't buy any material falling under this law. When enough do this sales will drop and they will notice. Out of sight & sound out of mind and ear. It doesn't exist.
There is plenty available for free.
No matter how much we try we won't able to wreck the lives of artists as much as the MAFIAA does.
How about we don't wreck anyone's lives?
Indeed - and it's no secret that the anime industry (both the Japanese creators and Western distributors) has often used levels of overseas piracy to determine which titles are worth licensing for release in the US/Europe.
It's not a foolproof method - it backfired badly during the industry-crash in the middle of the last decade when a lot of companies found that there are certain titles that people are just not going to walk up to a shop-counter with in the US or London, even though they'll nab them happily enough from a torrent. However, it can generally be a good way of spotting whether a title and/or similar titles are worth a subtitled streaming release, a physical DVD/BD release or potentially a fancy special edition box.
But yes, there's the reverse importation problem - and this is as relevant to gaming as it is for anime. For whatever reason, Japanese buyers of anime and video games are content to get ripped off to an utterly eye-watering degree. The "old" system for anime releases in the West was to set a price point of $30/£20 per volume of 4-5 episodes. These days, US/EU distributors struggle to get away with that model for all but the very biggest of releases (Puella Magi Madoka Magica is the most recent example I can think of) - it's more normal to get volumes of 13 or so episodes, for not much more than $40/£25 per volume. Meanwhile in Japan, that $40 equivalent gets you a volume containing... two episodes. The situation is broadly similar on games, where prices for many titles (particularly Japanese-developed ones) are utterly eye-watering in Japan.
Now if you've got a market that's willing to play along with prices like that, you're going to do everything you can to protect it - and that means doing whatever you can to block reverse importation. So yes, most Western (legal) streaming sites block Japanese IP addresses.
In the gaming sphere, Nintendo insist on full region locking (probably due to their Apple-style paternalist, authoritarian culture). Sony make it very hard to release region locked games on their console - there's only been one region locked PS3 game to date (Persona 4: Arena - and a worthy target for a boycott if ever there was one). But the 360... the 360 is more interesting. Microsoft neither ban nor mandate region locking; they leave it up to the publisher to decide (and don't lock the games they publish themselves). If you look at the trend for region locking on 360 games, while you can always find a few exceptions, a large of US releases will work on European consoles and vice versa, but very, very few will work on Japanese consoles. This at least partly explains why so many of the smaller Japanese developers have been willing to go the 360-exclusivity route during this console generation, despite the 360's poor installed base in Japan.
Exactly. Many, many of the people who pirate stuff also buy stuff.
It is just as easy to stop pirating AND buying as it is to just stop buying.
Plus there is no difference having an mp3 on your computer from a CD you legally purchased and ripped, and then later lost, versus having a pirated mp3. But when criminal jailtime is in play, this translates into having any mp3's on your computer being a bad idea that could land you in jail.
Draconian laws that can ruin someones life will eventually provide the impetus for people to stop pirating stuff AND stop buying stuff. Total avoidance will be the safest policy.
Then those police state espousing motherfuckers at the RIAA and MPAA can go the hell out of business.
The RIAA and MPAA should start tracking how the animosity that their customers feel about them impacts the bottom line. I wonder if they'd find a trend.
To me it seems like the RIAA and the fim makers have opposing goals.
The RIAA seems to want people to pirate (proof: the unskippable "educational" messages and other bothers that don't appear in the pirated version) so they can sue them and get some money. Thus they lower the quality of the official versions with respect to the pirated versions. The film makers want to sell their films, and don't want the viewers to pirate. To lower the quality of the official versions with crap like unskippable messages is contraproductive to this. Somehow the RIAA has the film makers believing the nagscreens are good. Dunno how they did it.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
... they will download the popular songs and not mine.
That's like saying I'm going to get a free lunch from the soup kitchen down the street instead of paying at your restaurant. The onus is on you, the artist, to prove to me why I should spend the time seeking you out and why I should spend money on you. This has been true since the dawn of time, and blaming your customers for downloading what they like will not help you one bit. Oh yeah, and pick your allies carefully - don't think for a second that the major labels won't go out of their way to marginalize you the moment your business model starts biting into their sales.
Yeah, but I've found most people who pirate have no bones about dropping serious bank on hardware.
That's probably because hardware isn't subject to a model of artificial scarcity. There are actual manufacturing and distribution costs involved in producing things like CPUs and hard drives.
If we ever have Star Trek-style replicators, you can expect that to change.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Population of Japan: ~128 million
Estimated Illegal Downloads: 4.38 billion
That works out to be a 34 songs per person per year in Japan. Somehow the mathematics just aren't there ....
Abolishing Copyright is my Anti-Piracy.
There is a big difference between wrecking someone's life by taking away their freedom and wrecking someone's life by ending a subsidy.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Even then it still won't work.
Anytime you have a headphone jack I can just play the play and record it on a second computer.
Anytime you have a DVI/HDMI jack I can just play the video and re-encode it on a second computer.
Why YES we do.... File-Sharing For Personal Use Declared Legal In Portugal
Average kid downloads 1,000 songs that could have been purchased for $0.99 each, so studios lost $999 (artists even less). Average Chinese bootleg produces 100,000 CDs and studios lose $1.3M. Why not go after the real problem?
I'll just leave this here....
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Studios didn't "lose" anything - they just didn't sell that much...
I'm not clear what an "open source artist" is: For artistic creations, there is no 'source code' to be open, only whatever sensory experience the artist has declared to be a work of art. Do you mean that you're an independent unsigned musician? Do you mean that you release your stuff under a Creative Commons license?
Here's the basic path to success for independent musicians:
1. Perform at any venue that will give you a chance to do so, so you can create some fans. If you don't get fans, then sorry mate, but you probably just aren't that good, keep your day job and enjoy making music as an amateur.
2. Start getting paid gigs. These will likely start out in venues you will hate, for not-very-large crowds and not a lot of money. You're trying to continue building your fan base, and also to create a good reputation among those who are responsible for booking musicians to play at venues in the area.
3. Make an album of your music and bring it to the paid gigs. Sell them for $10 a pop.
4. Any online presence is about building a fan base who will come to your live gigs. The goal is to be enough of a draw that you can start demanding higher prices and better working conditions from people who want to pay you to perform.
If you don't have at least a few people actively cheering you on, expressing interest in hiring you, or wanting to pay you for recordings, you just aren't professional grade. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not the fault of music piracy.
And I say this as somebody who's good enough to earn a very low 4 figures for my musical work.
I am officially gone from
I hate to point it out to you guys, but legally importing media is considered piracy by most large media companies. The old "If you are playing this game outside of Japan, you are committing a crime" on Japanese arcade cabinets comes to mind. The obtuseness of messages like that are the reasons I don't view much media anymore.
It would be sort of like if you refused to ever prosecute any store break-ins or shoplifting
No, it's nothing like that at all.
A store owner has a store full of stuff. If the government disappeared, he'd still have a store full of stuff. He might have to protect the stuff himself, or he may have to pay someone to protect it - but nevertheless, he has stuff. If someone shoplifts, he loses some finite amount of that stuff, and he no longer sells it.
A songwriter has a pretty tune. If the government disappeared, he'd still have a pretty tune. There is no way to protect this pretty tune - but it doesn't really matter because even if someone "steals" it, he can still hum the pretty tune. If he's lucky, his pretty tunes will turn the head of a patron of some sort and he might actually make some money. He could also make some money by performing the pretty song.
Short of a patron or a performance, the only reason a songwriter holds anything of value at all is because of a government subsidy. Taking away the subsidy has no moral hazard at all. If the system isn't working to the benefit of society in aggregate, then the system should be changed.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yes. And the total for artists (recorded + live) is growing.
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I still occasionally use Logic Audio, (Platinum 4.8.2) but in Win XP, and I admit it is a cracked copy. I only use a cracked copy because the serial dongle for my copy of Gold 4.8.2 has not worked for years. And while it matters little in the eyes of the lawyers or marketers, I do not use any of the features of Platinum, or Gold for that matter and would have been entirely happy using Silver, except that my floppy disc with authorization keys got mangled. I upgraded to gold to avoid having to deal with that issue again, only to have to deal with a failed dongle later on. I've given two opportunities and $400, only to be screwed. It may be a 'sense of entitlement' to feel that I should have the right to use Logic Audio, but I feel justified as I paid for it.
When Apple bought Emagic and announced that Windows would no longer be supported, rather than migrate to a Mac, I froze my audio environment. I'm a hobbyist afterall, and am not bothered by not having the latest and greatest even if there are true benefits.
If you make a market unviable by doing nothing to prevent infringement, piracy, etc etc, you are in effect giving the finger to people in that market segment.
The people in that market segment can always get a different career - any career. Markets die off all the time anyway due to evolution of markets as a whole - just ask the TV/radio repair industry.
Some poor slob who is locked-up in prison for downloading a song doesn't have any options for a couple of years, and all of his future options narrow down to menial/low-end labor after that.
So, maybe you can point out where the justice is in such a scenario?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Now that there is Crunchyroll which attempts to license all new anime and legally stream it subbed the same day it airs in Japan, that whole "we're just doing what the companies won't, we'll drop it when it gets picked up in the US" thing doesn't fly anymore. Japanese companies want overseas internet watchers watching it through crunchyroll, where they're getting a cut. And when they don't license it to crunchyroll, they've usually got a reason, usually a license that they haven't announced yet.
Also there's plenty of domestic problem with piracy nowadays. The piracy of anime in Japan is often driven more than it is overseas due to the fact that in Japan, most anime never reruns; if you miss an episode or want to watch something again, a lot of the time your only legal option is buying the DVD. Since overseas there is now a legal, replayable option that is easier than piracy and even works on cellphones, which can be watched for free if you're willing to watch some commercials and wait a couple days for new episodes (which you were going to do anyway for a fansub) the tables have turned.
Most subbing sites ban Japanese IPs because they think it covers their asses, not as some good-will gesture. I use to be involved with several fansub groups. And there was a time when they were doing it for the right reasons. But the world has changed now.
Well, there is the niggling fact that if the label is distributing it, then it cannot then sue folks for receiving the thing.
Same reason I can't toss my car keys at some shady-looking guy and then have him charged with auto theft.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Nothing is legal or illegal without a government. Once you have a government, you can make any rules that you want to. At some point, the people let our government make it illegal not to pay artists for the use of their work. Fair enough - but don't pretend that it is the natural state of things. Music predates US copyright law.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Problem is, you too-easily confuse copying with theft. Whether your doing that is out of ignorance or malicious design? I will leave to you and/or the reader.
Downloading, in the music industry's case, is when I make an exact duplicate of everything in that shopkeeper's store for my own use. Doing so in the real world means that the shopkeeper can't do jack about it. He has lost nothing, as all of his goods are still in the store, untouched and unchanged. So if he bitches and whines to the cops that the value of the goods in his store is essentially zero because everyone else is busy making perfect copies of the store's contents w/o removing anything from his store, then yeah, that is just his tough luck.
Personal Opinion? As long as no hardware is touched and no rights are abridged, I would love (no, seriously, love) to see the MPAA/RIAA get stupid and lock down every movie, song, and show with unbreakable DRM. Then maybe folks would get a hint, dump the cartels, and find other ways to get entertained. Then the RIAA/MPAA can die a slow and much-deserved death.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
That's not at all what's happening.
It's not a direct subsidy, but it is a subsidy. Artists could not make money selling content if it were not for the government. The same effect could be achieved by taxing everyone who buys a music player and then redistributing the money according to popularity. This is how ASCAP works, for instance. That is more or less a direct subsidy - the government allows a private entitiy to levy a "tax" and then redistribute it to the songwriters. If you object to my use of the word subsidy, I'll refrain from using it and use a word you would prefer - it is immaterial to the discussion.
No, a songwriter does have something of value, it's just that, without copyright, he has something of low **MARKET** value.
I'm not really interested in getting THAT philosophical. Music is obviously important to humans in some non-financial way. Hell, we value it enough to have this crazy copyright system in place. But you can't eat music, you can't gas your car with it, and the only way to get people to pay for it directly (in certain formats) is to have the government enforce the "value" in monetary terms. Of course, it has always had financial value in non-subsidized formats. People paid to see Mozart live. People paid him substantial amounts to teach them how to play. He made a living. But he made very little on CDs :)
equivalent of a store owner trying to sell *valuable* products, but where all the customers find it so easy to steal stuff from the store that everything has a *market* value of zero
That would be a very short-term situation. Once the shop is emptied, the goods would be worth what they were (or even more) than when the looting started. An MP3 has very little, if any, intrinsic value - though again, in certain circumstances, people will pay for music naturally. A jukebox is a good example. People who steal music rather than pay $1 on iTunes will feed a dollar into a jukebox to hear a song once without even blinking.
Laws against shoplifting and enforcement raises the value of those products up near their proper value.
You have it backwards. Laws keep prices low, because the shop owner doesn't need to hire people to protect his goods. Can you imagine what it would cost to keep a store like Walmart protected in total anarchy? It wouldn't even be feasible. The cost of simple goods would skyrocket, if you could get them at all.
I think you could - just as legitimately - argue that shoplifting laws are a "government subsidy" for businesses.
I think it is commonly considered a basic function of government to keep the peace. If the government put a cop in stores to prevent shoplifting, I'd agree - but having a law on the books that makes it illegal to steal is pretty basic stuff, and it helps everyone who owns anything. The reason you need laws specific to shoplifting is to handle the special case of this public/private space. Anyway, it is hard to generalize since the laws are different everywhere; I'm sure there are jurisdictions where the laws do act as a subsidy.
You seem to have a negative connotation associated with "subsidy". I do not. I like it when a community revitalizes the downtown by dressing it up and lowering taxes and such - an obvious subsidy. I even like the basic premise of copyright law - though I think it should involve much shorter time periods and probably only involve commercial use.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
failing to protect those invested in a market is the same as giving them the finger.
You can phrase it like that if you want to, but there's nothing sacred about protecting someone's investment in a market; the government should protect things that are good for the whole society. Copyright exists "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", and this is done by giving an exclusive right to authors and inventors. This exclusive right is not the reason why we have copyright, it's just the means to a goal.
Just because someone worked hard or invested in something, it doesn't mean they should be protected by the government.
Said large set of labor can be automated almost entirely already, and probably entirely if we invest into it.
The problem is that it's much cheaper to just hire desperate people to do that job than it is to invent and produce robots to do it - even if robots are cheaper in very long term.
The Subject "Illegal Downloading now a Crime", says it all, and what it says is that the corporations have won. If it was illegal downloading then it would have already been a crime, or it would not have been illegal downloading. "Illegal Downloading", has traditionally not been an actual thing but instead is a term used as a scare tactic. Similarly there is no such thing as an illegal copy. Traditionally, it has been the distribution or copying itself that is illegal, unlike stolen goods which remain tainted, Copies made without authorization have no lasting taint to them. So traditionally it has been the case that if someone serves you a song, they are the ones that are liable. If you serve it back out because you're on P2P, then and only they are you also liable. But the PR war was so effectively won, that this major change, is mis-reported.
Shopkeepers could not make money selling things if we didnt have laws preventing theft.
Of course they could - they could defend the store themselves or hire someone to do it for them. This is what happens when there is a "failed state". You pay the warlord to protect you.
Banks couldnt make money off of loans if we didnt have laws making those loans enforceable.
That's half-true. Loans predate the government. I'll take your goat as collateral. But the modern US banking system is heavily dependent on government, with instruments that are arguably even more abstract than IP.
Im not clear where the difference here is, copyright laws make it possible to profit off of a creative work, which is the intent.
I'm not arguing about their intent.
Shall we not reform tax law because accountants and tax lawyers might lose their jobs?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I'm a struggling open source artist trying to make some cash, but as long as pirates are allowed to download what they want.. well, they will download the popular songs and not mine. By fighting against piracy, we open source artists win as people have to listen to our music instead.
This is not only true for music, but also software development and everything else FOSS. If anti-piracy would win, then so would open source software.
Let me take a guess.
You make music, you try to sell it. You don't do any advertising and want to blame you lack of success on pirates.
Here's a better idea. Give your music away for free online. Get it out to as many ears as you can. Do shows. Sell CD's, shirts, whatever you want at the shows.
You looking to be rich? It's going to take a lot of work, because you need to advertise.
Like right now, you can have a link to your website or something, but do you? No.
I have no idea what sort of music you play, if it's good, or what not. What i do know is you are whining like a bitch about piracy when the problem is yourself.
Be seeing you...
For each famous artist who gets the spotlight for some time there are thousands others who can barely live. That is what the current model promotes. Record Labels are reasonably good to very few artists and horribly bad for most of them.
Firstly you can't steal music. It is impossible. At most you can engage in an activity illegal in some countries called "copyright violation" which is not even remotely like stealing.
Secondly most of human art was developed before copyright existed, and art didn't get either better or more prolific since then because of copyright. Copyright is absurd. To compose and create any person uses thousands of years of public domain works and add a little bit of their "original" work, and then feel in the right to appropriate the result giving nothing back to the public domain for more than a hundred years.
And last, even in today's word, with copyright, far more musicians live from performing than from recording labels. There is no motive to protect the "rights" of those who decide to sell what should be free like those rights were born with Mankind. Copyright is an outdated model that has no reason to continue existing.