Effect of Stricter File Sharing Penalties in Japan on Foreign Fans

[AurA]

I believe we are living in what I personally like to call "The Wild West" of internet culture. File sharing, Pirating, Torrenting, what ever you like to call it, is easy, safe, cheap and provides any kind of content you can imagine. Eventually this will end and most of us will resort to buying content legitimately. When the threat of penalties are higher, the difficulty of pirating content is higher, and the cost of buying content legitimately is lower people will move away from pirating and buy content. I don't think it will ever be impossible to pirate content, but it will inevitably become more difficult and costly.



This seems to be happening much faster in Japan then anywhere else.

With stories like this

and This



Which brings concerns for foreign fans. The costs of buying Japanese content outside of Japan is higher then within Japan for fairly obvious reasons. While some content is just not available outside of Japan like TV appearances. With services like iTunes, Youtube, and YesAsia it is possible to have access to SOME content but not all. I doubt that Japanese media companies (looking at you Up Front Works) will ever cater to foreign fans without some massive influx of foreign fans.



I don't expect to see changes happen overnight but I do think it will be harder for people to export content to us foreigners as these new rules are actually enforced.



Ideally I would like to see a Hello!Project subscription service that provided music, HD PVs, DVDs, Photobooks, original content like Hello!Project Station, and maybe other tv appearances. Subtitles would also be great, but not expected.



So what do you guys think? What changes do you expect to see happen over the next few years, and what would you want to see happen?

[al kusanagi]

Nothing of note will happen. Personally I buy all the blu-rays they put out and whatever they put on US iTunes, but as far as TV shows go, there's no choice on the matter. They're definitely expanding into wider reaching free services like Youtube and live streams which is nice, but the majority of content will still come from those in Japan uploading everything.

[rob]

Eventually everything will go online, micro payments are the future but these kind of things take time.

Itunes does have a rental service that I would totally use for concerts for example, I really don't want the case etc but I'd pay 250 yen to digitally rent the concert for say a 24 hours period.

Physical media like cds will fade out but again it will take time. Blu-rays are here to stay in their physical form, streaming a blu-ray movie would be way too much for the vast majority of internet connections.

The whole scene will be vastly different in 25 years but until then.... It kinda sucks.

[Ap2000]

I don't expect any change for the western people.

I think the change for the Japanese people will also only be very minimal. It's not like the police wasn't allowed to do crackdowns before.