Planet’s PDA enables CD shoppers to browse music:

“Net venture business Planet Co said Thursday it has developed a personal digital assistant (PDA) that enables customers to “browse through” or listen to the contents of music CDs simply by having the PDA sensor recognize the bar code attached to CD’s plastic cover.

Once a shopper brings the “HOTNAVI” PDA system close to the CD cover and lets it recognize the bar code, the music on that CD will be played back and radioed to the shopper via a headphone attached to the PDA, the company said.” Japan Today [via Declan McCullagh’s Politech]

The technology is easy. My guess is that they’ll probably stream the music to you wirelessly. It would have to be a local network; if it were just sent over the Internet you could give the machine whatever barcoding it needed to provide you with a given recording no matter where you were, even if you had to figure out a way to spoof the machine into thinking it were in the music store. But even if broadcast only locally within the confines of the store, it seems it would be difficult to prevent the digital cloning that’ll inevitably arise by clever users who circumvent whetever copy protection scheme they engineer into the PDA.. Perhaps they won’t provide the entire recording? Does anyone know more about how this scheme will really work? A Google search comes up with nothing further…