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 hope the Music industry pays the connection chrg

[freedom_india]

Iam sure the RIAA will pay my internet connection charges or atleast the provider will make it free.
If not, am filing a suit on using my money illegally without my permission.
I will file the case against the provider, they are ones who connect my phone to 'net.
If many people file, am sure they will either stop helping RIAA or bill them.
If not, an legally obliged to defend my property against unauthorized assaults.

No effect whatsoever

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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?

It's Not Already?

[dancingmad]

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.

Re:No connection?

[coalrestall]

Phones are supposed to work in the subways but most of the time they don't. It seems to be limited to certain lines.

JASRAC Strikes Again...

[Xin Jing]

I remember living in Okinawa back in 1993, JASRAC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JASRAC [wikipedia.org] 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.

Re:user would pay for all costs

[Cheesetrap]

didn't get to read the article because it requires a fucking registration and I'm unwilling to register just to read this tripe

PrefBar [mozdev.org] allows you to change your user-agent, you may be able to use it to impersonate a GoogleBot (they seem to be indexed by google so it's worth a shot). I can't test it just now as I have 58 tabs open and some of them have large flash videos loaded, but this may be just the thing to facilitate your tripe-viewing in future. :)

Re:user would pay for all costs

[Jared555]

Now if you want to make a billion dollars, invent a bluetooth-activated dildo that fires up on every incoming call. It will certainly contribute to shorter calls so you can get the next one.

Ironically I am pretty sure this was on the screen savers/attack of the show (it was right around when they switched shows) at one point.... Pretty sure it detected the RF from the cell phone though.

Re:Yet Another Sky Is Falling

[Cheesetrap]

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 [wikipedia.org] (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.

Re:You know the answer

[L4t3r4lu5]

... Resulting in network providers constantly receiving calls from phone users who couldn't play any music after only two days of ownership as the authorisation server was being hammered / poor network service, and thousands of consumers simply stopping the direct debits.

What can they do? "Urrr... You're contractually obliged for 24 months to pay us £25 per month for the service." "Oh, right. You're contractually obliged to provide the service I pay for. QED, bitch."

Re:Yet Another Sky Is Falling

[GauteL]

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 only the start

[Wierdy1024]

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...

Re:Yet Another Sky Is Falling

[AK Marc]

I went to three Internet cafes in China. In all three cases, I was the only foreigner in there. Where I am now, the Internet cafes are full of non-tourists. I'm not sure if they are residents or just on long-term visas, but they aren't people visiting for a week or two and leaving. Those people now seem to carry their own computers with them and look for hotels with Internet. The people on tourist trips of a week either care enough to take their computer with them, or don't care enough to check email for the week. It's the people that only had desktops or left stuff behind or are shipping it or came from a place with Internet cafes for primary use that they go to the Internet cafes here.