The H!P Musings/Rants Thread

[Amped]

back in August, Oricon announced it would launch a different ranking system starting on December 19th (the new Oricon year).
https://www.oricon.co.jp/confidence/special/51685/

now Oricon is getting ready to launch its new system
https://www.oricon.co.jp/news/2125667/full/

[JonCC]

What is this now, the 4th change in almost as many years?

[JonCC]

It appears some users on H!O (and perhaps elsewhere) will attempt to make UF aware of the presumably fraudulent "Morning Musume Germany©" that's been active on various streaming services.
http://www.hello-online.org/index.php?/ ... try2120568

EDIT:

Ah, seems like someone beat them to it
https://twitter.com/hipnewsservice/stat ... 9262255106

[Amped]

so someone in Germany is trying to illegally profit off Upfront by pretending to look legit on platforms like spotify. Did he do this because Germany has region blocked a lot of content?

[JonCC]

The fact that an actual trademark has been made makes this quite serious.

Remember the Are You Happy / A Gonna single being on Spotify and discovering it was placed by someone who uses the “Morning Musume Germany” trademark.
Right. I will make this a thread but basically this person has done much more fucked up shit & illegally steals UFP’s money.

So I will not post too much personal information, you can look it up yourself, but basically this person made “Morning Musume Germany” a real trademark and company, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to put the songs on Spotify.

He has an address, phone number, e-mail address and much more under this company name. And acts as “CEO” of the company (it’s all somewhere on the site) & finding all of this stuff on other sites too seems to me he really established at least something...

Looking this up on google, it tells you it’s an online shop. They have a google business page on which they “”sell”” both fanmade and real goodies (it directs you to the website though, I will post more when I’m on desktop as it doesn’t show on mobile)

https://twitter.com/neruchii777/status/ ... 1213777920

[Menno]

The guy bought an online trademark for "morning musume germany", that's easily done and probably not even illegal. Using the trademark to earn money with copyrighted material on online platforms is of course not legal in any way.

The best thing we can do is directly contact Up Front and flag everything this guy does on YouTube, Instagram, Spotify so he won't be able to monetize.

[Amped]

Today, Oricon implemented its new charts to their system "Weekly combined single chart" and
"Weekly combined album chart", it combines CD sales, Digital download sales, and or streaming into a new wacky point system

https://www.oricon.co.jp/rank/about-combinerank/

last week's releases received the first ever Oricon points
https://www.oricon.co.jp/rank/cos/w/2018-12-24/
https://www.oricon.co.jp/rank/coa/w/2018-12-24/
https://www.oricon.co.jp/news/2125785/full/

the normal Oricon weekly charts remains intact.

[JonCC]

At least part of the Japanese fanbase is now aware of the fraudulant Morning Musume Germany affair.
http://idolscheduler.jp/news/detail/?n_id=3296

[Menno]

He has also "published" the MM songs through a company called TuneCore, who have licenced it on YouTube. He has really looked into this and gone all the way. Luckily companies like TuneCore and YouTube are allergic for this kind of situations, they only think in lawsuits. If there's any doubt they shut it down.

I hope that Up Front will act soon, they can always ask JASRAC for help.

[Nayoko-Kihara]

I just hope things don't get screwed up for everyone else because of him pulling this stunt. I'm quite content with the way UF deal with fan uploads at the moment (from live clips to reactions, covers, compilations, etc) often claiming them but otherwise leaving quite a bit of stuff alone barring it being brand new or unreleased. They're relatively lenient, everyone gets something out of it, and I'd like to see it stay that way.