-- As the Music/Video Content Copyright Management Law (provisional name) takes effect on Oct. 1, private-sector companies will be able to easily enter the copyright management business, such as music and images.

The "monopoly" held by the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) for more than 60 years will virtually collapse, and companies such as e License Inc. and Japan Rights Clearance will begin entering the copyright management business for musical works. The competition is bound to spur the use of music and images in the Internet business. In line with this, efforts toward copyright management on the Internet are being made by each industry, such as music, video and advertisement.

The market scale for content-related materials in Japan in 2001 is 12,025.6 billion yen, of which contents themselves make up 1,834.9 billion yen (Fig. 1). (119.79 yen = US$1) Among these, the market scale of the contents distributed on networks is 318.1 billion yen. Most of the sales are generated through online databases and online Karaoke in this market. And although the scale of Internet distributions of music and images is still small, melodies signaling an incoming call for mobile phones are growing fast and are expected to be the field that will see further growth in the future.