Japanese Supreme Court Rules TV Forwarding Illegal 177
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."
Ridiculous (Score:2, Insightful)
This ruling is ridiculous. Once a signal is openly broadcast why do the content providers think they can limit how you view the content?
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:3, Insightful)
You fool! This is Japanese TV we're talking about!
Think about it: No more Japanese TV means a significant drop in anime produced. A significant drop in anime means less of it exported to the US (legality notwithstanding). That leads to the otaku/Japanophiles in the US losing their candy-colored pseudo-philosophic drivel. THAT leads to their now relatively-well-contained minor communities breaking down, and that leads to them breaking out and infesting the rest of the internet at large!
Don't you see? This isn't about keeping the slobbering masses stupid! This is about keeping the slobbering masses away from US!
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:0, Insightful)
You know, generally whenever someone uses the term "slobbering masses", I know with 99% certainty that they're a dick.
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, and as more and more people stop watching TV, the amount of ads that show up in commercial breaks on Hulu grows. It's up to two, now, from just one -- don't you think that by the time TV "goes away," it will have reached parity, rendering this argument obsolete?
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe by then you'll have the good sense to give up on Hulu too.
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:4, Insightful)
And just do the sensible thing and just pirate everything (and then whine unceasingly when shows get canceled for lack of revenue from viewers) or is this a "popular culture is so crass and I'm so sophisticated it hurts, but in a snooty way, not a plebeian way" statement?
Re:Ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score:5, Insightful)
And just do the sensible thing and just pirate everything (and then whine unceasingly when shows get canceled for lack of revenue from viewers) or is this a "popular culture is so crass and I'm so sophisticated it hurts, but in a snooty way, not a plebeian way" statement?
Right. As if piracy has ever been the cause of a show being cancelled.
Re:Wait...what? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.