Just the Beginning of Mobile Piracy
I read about this last week, and Joi's got a good post about it:
Camera phone book theft banned in Japanese bookstores
People are using digital cameras and camera phones in Japan to photograph pages of magazines and books instead of buying them.
Starting on Tuesday, bookstores across the nation will put up posters urging magazine readers to "refrain from recording information with camera-mounted cellphones and other devices".
I know several people who use digital cameras as document storage devices. Just yesterday, I saw a very cool camera mount for taking pictures of documents with your digital camera. In the context of copyright, there are some very interesting issues here that tie into the whole area of photography copyright.
via imajes via #joiito bot blog
This of course is just the beginning. The images above are taken directly from #mobitopia regular Clarity's moblog. So okay, nothing too special right? Well, you can *see* them right? If he wanted, I'm sure that he could've taken a few video clips as well. 10 second video clips aren't anything special either, I'll give you that, but it's the beginning. I'm sure there's someone in Hollywood who doesn't even like the fact that these blurry photos are out there already. They're going to have kittens when the *real* phones start coming.
Again, right now the 3650 just shows what's possible. Combine the Symbian OS with a 1.3 Megapixel camera and a 512MB SD card in future phones and suddenly you have a video pirate's paradise. Not too great quality for watching on your TV? No problem, they can get shared around to be watched on the way to work (or in the corner of your screen *at* work. ;-) ). Or something else.
The future is coming quickly... I don't know if copyrights can keep up.
-Russ