Japan: Now wants its people to buy more junk!
The customer is not always… well, rarely, right in Japan, and manufacturers don’t really care about them. The second hand marker flourishes over here, and most people take good care of their equipment, so used goods are usually in a very good condition and are sold easily to be replaced by new goods. It’s easy to strike a good deal when buying these second hand goods. But that’s exactly the big problem for manufacturers, because this grey market is not generating them any profit, and they would like to get rid of this phenomenon.
So from April 1st 2006, ALL electronic products sold in Japan before 2001 will be prohibited from the 2nd hand market!
Update: Engadget confirms this is not an April Fool’s joke! They also mention that exports are exempt so the rest of the world will get a chance to buy this stuff.
Update II – Electric Boogaloo: Here’s another side of the story saying it’s not as bad as everyone is saying, but still admitting that
it will be rather more troublesome for retailers to sell used electronics, and there may be less small stores doing so.
Alert! Cheap Japanese 2nd-hand electronics about to flood the American markets! You buy! Good deal! Almost free!
Aldous Huxley unavailable for comment.
Buy! Buy! Buy!
What about collectors items like a Famicom or some one of a kind rice cooker from the 70’s? Does this law apply to things other than a used TV?
Sounds like a job for the Yakuza!
This should work about as well as Prohibition in the US [and – arguably – the “War on Drugs”].
If there is a demand for items, a market will develop to meet that demand. A law won’t eliminate the market, just drive it “under-ground”.
You would have to eliminate the demand, to kill the market.
Get out! Man, talk about criminalizing a population. How is this enforcable? Selective punishment? Arbitrarily bust a few people and ruin their lives? The RIAA has to be drooling.
Laughable! I always said Japan is a country of silly people.
Gee whiz go figure..
First, we get all the devices that still copy or produce on their own off the resale market.
Now we sell them new stuff that cannot be used to defeat our copy protection. (See SONY run)
Then we make BIG YEN!
Same thing has been going on here (USA).
One thing that jerked me was the place I live (Sacramento), pushing the cost of remodeling permits up by 300% to “encourage” us to buy new houses instead of improving those we live in.
I wonder how this will affect the new item market too and could actually backfire. I talked to people who know people in Japan. They say a lot of Japanese don’t keep things long like 6 month and go buy the newest thing on the block. Now I’m safe in guessing that they sell the old thing to help pay for the new one. So now they can’t get top dollar (if any) anymore from their used item means they have less money for a new one. So instead of buying something every 6 months they will buy something every 2 years.
This sounds like the RIAA to me.
I wonder if Japan has some form of Yahoo’s Freecycle.You could give away these products that SONY wants you to throw away.Boing boing tells a little more about how the car companies in Japan came up with this ripoff.Check it out. I guess Toyota and Honda aren’t the forward thinking corp.citizens we think they are.
There goes ebay japan.
Japan was doing this on cars in the mid 1970s when I was stationed at Atsugi. So what is new? This is the way Japan operates.
Japan also makes it very hard to keep cars for more than a few years, through an ornerous inspection program. Once no one in Japan can by them, they are shippped abroad for sale.
I think this will soon happen in Europe, later North America, then back to Asia.
It’s more about protecting our environment than simply helping manufacturers sell more products.
>more about protecting our environment
You mean by preventing legitimate recycling?
Just plain stupid….being able to sell your old equipment is an impetus to buy new. As someone who is generally too lazy to sell his old stuff, I would never be impacted by this…but the idea just seems ludicrous to me.
Japan has a similar law on cars that’s been around for awhile to encourage the sale of new cars that are safer with better technology by jacking up the insurance rates when the cars turn some certain age I think at 5 years old, and yet again when it turns 10.