A silly idea meets an unfair end

Japanese ISP Livedoor recently announced a minor and seemingly harmless service whereby you sent in fistfuls of CDs (in 50s) to be ripped into mp3 format, and they posted the originals plus a bunch of CD-Rs back to you.

We'll stipulate for the moment that there are people in the world who have Internet access but lack a CD-R drive in their PC, or lack the time to rip an extensive CD collection, and that therefore the service was going to find some market. Whatever. The point of interest comes in the most recent development. The service was shut down on May 12 after protests from the copyright mafia, and has now been restarted with an extra feature: on the online application form, you have to check a box indicating that you have received the permission of the copyright holder to turn their music into mp3s. The site even lists the numbers of JASRAC and other copyright bodies, so you can phone them up to ask for their blessing. Do we assume this is a formality, and that they say "yes"? Or is Livedoor posting this in a combined protest and admission that their service is screwed?

[Via ITmedia (Japanese)]