NMPA_International_Survey_12th_Edition

APPENDIX
C
JAPAN UPDATE
Sales in Japan, the world’s second-largest music
market behind the U.S., continue to decline.
According to IFPI, in 2003 the territory lost 10.2%
in units to fall to 312.8 million, with a corresponding
loss of value of 9.9%, to ¥575.9 billion ($4.6 billion).
IFPI noted that Japan has continued to suffer from
internet piracy and CD burning,and estimated that 236
million CD-Rs were burned in the territory in 2002,
while legitimate CD sales were 229 million.
Copyright fee collections by the Japanese Society for
Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC)
for the year ending March 31, 2002, decreased by 1% to
¥105.3 billion ($793.9 million), due mainly to lower
mechanical royalty collections. Performance rights collections
increased 6.9% to ¥40.5 billion ($305.3 million)
in the year,while mechanical royalties fell 8.8% to ¥48.4
billion ($365.1 million). JASRAC’s collections for the
year also included ¥2 billion ($15 million) in fees from
publications,down 25.5%;¥4 billion ($30 million),down
3.1%, in fees from CD and video rentals; ¥9.3 billion
($70.2 million), up 23.5%, in “compound use” income
from online karaoke service operators and downloadable
ringing tones; and ¥1.1 billion ($8.3 million), up
4.3%, in home-copying compensation fees from makers
of digital-recording hardware and software.
JASRAC also noted that during the year it had introduced
an Internet-based copyright management system
and is now working toward setting up a digital database
of works administered by JASRAC.
The Recording Industry Assn. of Japan (RIAJ) and
(JASRAC) announced the results of a series of tests
they said prove that electronic watermarking technology
can be used effectively in copyright management,
including the ability to successfully track watermarkembedded
CD audio files that had been converted
into MP3 files and uploaded to the Internet using
JASRAC’s J-MUSE song-tracking system. Watermarking
technology from four different companies was used in
the tests. The RIAJ and JASRAC have been working
together to investigate the practicality of watermarking
technology since the end of 2001, when they created
the Audio Watermarking Technology Investigation
Consortium.
RIAJ chairman Isamu Tomitsuka resigned from his
post after three years on March 1, 2003, citing health
reasons. His replacement, Tom Yoda—who also serves
as chairman of label Avex,will serve out the remainder
of Tomitsuka’s second two-year term, which ends in
May 2004.Yoda has promised to work on extending the
copyright term for sound recordings: currently sound
recordings are protected for 50 years,while the protection
period for motion pictures was recently extended
from 50 to 70 years.
In January 2003, the RIAJ and 13 of its member
record companies settled their case against digital
broadcaster Daiichikosyo Co., Ltd., operator of the
StarDigio digital music broadcasting service.RIAJ sued
the service in 1998,alleging that StarDigio’s practices of
playing entire albums in digital form and pre-announcing
those albums encouraged users to make perfect,
permanent copies rather than purchasing the albums.
Under the terms of the settlement, StarDigio can no
longer pre-announce the start or end times of the
tracks to be broadcast, and cannot broadcast entire
albums within an agreed period after their release.
The findings were announced a few months after
the release of an RIAJ study that found music in Japan
being copied onto CD-R and rewritable (CD-RW) discs
at a rate of 236 million discs a year. The survey, which
polled 1,000 people from high-school age to their mid-
50s, found about 66% of respondents saying they had
made personal recordings over a six month period,
compared with 53% who purchased new CDs; that 48%
of the CD-R/RWs sold in Japan are used to make copies
of prerecorded music; and that over 40% of the CDs
that were copied onto CD-Rs had been rented.
The RIAJ released another study in May 2002,
reporting that about 75 million music files had been
downloaded—most illegally—in the country since filesharing
services started becoming popular in the last
two to three years.
To combat the increase in unauthorized online filesharing
and CD-R copying, several labels, led by
Japanese independent Avex,began releasing copy-protected
CDs throughout 2002. The other labels include
Warner Music Japan,Toshiba-EMI,Universal Music K.K.,
Pony Canyon, Zomba Records, Victor Entertainment,
and Sony Music Entertainment (Japan).The RIAJ introduced
voluntary standardized stickers to alert consumers
to the limits of the CDs they were purchasing,
enumerating the types of devices on which the discs
can be played.
On Jan. 29, 2003, the Tokyo District Court ruled that
MMO Japan, which had been distributing a Japaneselanguage
version of the File Rogue file-sharing software,
had violated the copyrights of the members of
JASRAC and of the RIAJ. In Japan’s first-ever legal
action against an online file-sharing music service, the
RIAJ and JASRAC sued MMO Japan in February 2002
and were granted a preliminary injunction against the
company, which caused it to suspend operations in
April 2002. It was the first-ever legal action against an
online file-sharing music service in Japan. Damages
have yet to be determined, and MMO Japan has maintained
it will appeal the final decision.
In October 2002, the Tokyo High Court upheld a
May 1999 ruling by the Tokyo District Court that found
three companies guilty of illegally importing and selling
CDs and cassettes of material originally recorded
by Japanese artists in the 1930s and ‘40s. The defendants—Tokyo-based
importers/labels ARC and FIC and
Osaka-based mail-order company Soutsu—were
ordered to stop importing and selling the material, to
dispose of existing stock, and to pay five record labels
a total of ¥410 million ($51 million) in compensation
for the 480,000 units already sold.
NMPA INTERNATIONAL SURVEY TWELTH EDITION APPENDIX C: U.K., JAPAN, GERMANY, FRANCE, CANADA, ITALY AND SPAIN UPDATES
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