On January 23, 2024, the Japan Agency for Cultural Affairs (hereinafter “ACA”) developed and published a draft “Approach to AI and Copyright” for public comment.
A month later, more than 25,000 comments were received, which led to the body of the document being modified and adopted in the first weeks of April 2024.
Now, this is not the first time that the correlation between Artificial Intelligence and Copyright has been discussed in Japan . In its regulations of January 1, 2019 on Intellectual Property, Article 30-4 was implemented, which allowed broad Rights to ingest and use works protected by Copyright for any data analysis, including the training of Artificial Intelligence models.
Article 2(1) of the Japanese Copyright Law states that a work protected by Intellectual Property must be defined as a creation that expresses “human thoughts and emotions”, so again, as happens in Europe or the United States, it seems difficult for Artificial Intelligence to become the owner of such rights .
However, the Japanese Committee, in the case where the creation has been carried out by a natural person or legal entity and the use of Artificial Intelligence, the latter may be considered to have Rights provided that the following circumstances occur:
- The amount and content of instructions and input requests from the AI user.
- The number of generation attempts, modifying the output to obtain the result desired by the AI user.
- The AI user selects the job from multiple generated jobs.
- Human modifications after AI-generated work.
Japan's own Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Keiko Nagoaka , pointed out that AI companies in Japan could use it interchangeably, which led to the territory being considered a “paradise of machine learning.”
There were also some limitations when it negatively affected the copyright holders, thus causing damages and losses to them. However, the courts do not have case law to address this dispute, so they are helpless when it comes to responding to any judicial dispute of this type. In this regard, it is worth highlighting that the ACA has repeatedly pointed out that each case must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.
Singapore has developed AI Model Governance Guidelines for generative AI that identify data as a central element, making it necessary to ensure data quality . In the event that this model is controversial, such as personal data and copyrighted material, the owner of the use of Artificial Intelligence must provide commercial clarity, guarantee fair treatment and do so in a pragmatic manner.
The conclusion that can be drawn regarding Copyright and Artificial Intelligence in Japan is that it is a paradise that supports the development of Artificial Intelligence tools and the framework in which it is implemented will lead to legal problems.
