Japan fighting Cellphone Music Piracy!

In Japan, If you own a cell phone AND download music illegaly thru it, beware now…well, not now, but just to let you know that the Japanese Government and the Music industry are going to discuss a technological way to tackle the music piracy thru the cellphones.

The Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry and the telecom and music industries plan to jointly introduce a system to prevent cell phone users from downloading illegally distributed music files to their cell phones via the Internet, it has been learned.

The system, which could be operational as early as fiscal 2010, will be the first of its kind in the world, according to sources.

The system will be discussed by a council to be established on Sept. 16 by the Recording Industry Association of Japan, Telecommunications Carriers Association and others. In addition to the internal affairs ministry, companies and organizations affected by the subject also will participate in the project.

The reason for the new antipiracy campaign is that the circulation of such files is harming legitimate online music file distribution using cell phones. Domestically, the size of this market was worth about 100 billion yen in 2007–the largest such figure in the world.

Some users download such music files for free from Internet bulletin boards established for cell phone users. The files are uploaded after being copied from the original data source. A large, though unspecified, number of people are said to be involved in such practices.

Cell phones are used to illegally download about 400 million songs each year in Japan, exceeding the number of songs legitimately downloaded by about 70 million songs. Legitimate downloads cost about 300 yen per track.

Under the envisaged system, when users download music files to their cell phones, the song’s ID information will be sent from the cell phone to a computer server, which will check the information. The server then judges whether the music file was distributed legitimately. If the file was copied illegally, a warning message will be sent on the user’s cell phone.

If a user continues to download music, the server will either terminate the downloads or render the phone incapable of playing the music after it has been downloaded.

Source: Yomiuri Online / Image Source

Not sure if They are meddling with the user´s privacy as well, but I can see a lot of discussion for this project.  Let´s see whats happen next.

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