Japan amends its copyright legislation to meet future demands in AI and Big Data

"In May this year, Japan’s National Diet approved a legislation for updating its “Copyright Act" a reform that focused on allowing much-needed flexibility and legal certainty for innovators. The main objective of this amendment was to promote innovative digital and Artificial Intelligence (AI) services that are emerging or will emerge in the future, primarily by removing ambiguity for using copyrighted works for understanding and analysis.

In other words, Japan has insured that copyright cannot be an obstacle for AI. As the European Parliament prepares to review and vote once more on its own copyright rules on 12 September, it is worth taking a look at how Japanese lawmakers rightfully connected machine learning technologies with the development of AI, and successfully managed to balance their copyright rules to support their technological ambitions."