Link: “Culture First” madness

現行制度では、政令で指定された録音・録画用の機器や媒体のみが補償金制度の対象となっているが、提言では機器や媒体、サービスの別を問わず、私的複製に供される「複製機能」を補償の対象とすることを求めている。“Culture First” (lol) is a lobbying group formed of right holders including music publishers in Japan.

They were the driving force to introduce copy-once DRM on OTA TV broadcast, and criminalizing pirate downloads.

Now they claim their “personal music copy compensation” income gets to none because consumers can’t copy data anymore. These people are either crazy, or don’t understand what they’re talking about. Or both.

Just to back up a little bit, the compensation system was founded in 1992, way before MP3s etc. took mainstream, and its target was mostly DAT, Mini Disk and CD-R. If you buy those blank disks of CD-R at computer shops or record shops in Japan (if you find any), there are two choices: one for Music and the other for Data. These are the physically same disks, but “for Music” disks cost a little higher because it has this compensation on top, which will then be distributed to the publisher.

It’s weird, but that was the only way to compensate the “private copy” of music you can never track.

Now we’re in 2013, where we watch digital OTV with DRM protection, and various shows on Hulu/Apple TV with its own fees, or buy music from iTunes without DRM (finally). Consumers can directly buy or pay for these media, and publisher will get income base on the sales. It’s clearer than ever.

It is music industry who introduces all this situation, and it should’ve been obvious that this compensation system will not work anymore, and it’s a good thing.

And they’re complaining about it, and propose to make a law to collect fees from ANY devices and services (including laptop computers, iPads or Dropbox) if they can copy a music.

If we’re not calling these guys nuts, what could it be?

Note that it’s not the first time they proposed this, indeed they started lobbying this when iPod came out, and they have never been successful about it, and the supreme court had a decision that the system will never be applied to digital distribution of the content. So I’m optimistic.