Japan is an entertainment powerhouse, with a media industry expected to grow to US$114.3 billion in 2024.
As Japan’s music, animation, movie and TV productions become more popular globally, they attract a substantial number of online actors capturing, uploading and disseminating Japanese content illegally over the internet, often in foreign languages including English, Chinese and Vietnamese.
The Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs has estimated piracy costs the Japanese economy ¥2 trillion per year, or US$13 billion, with more than 1,000 websites offering free, illegal downloads of Japanese content including graphic novels, animation, music, games and movies.
Now, Japan intends to fight back with artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
"There are limitations to finding pirated sites with the human eye, as it takes time and cost,” the Agency for Cultural Affairs stated.
“We would like to develop effective countermeasures to reduce pirated sites and protect rights holders."
Leveraging AI to enforce copyright
Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs proposes to spend US$2 million on a pilot program that will use AI to scour the internet for pirated content, using image and text detection systems.
Human moderators aren’t able to keep up with the sheer volume of content being shared online, undercutting Japan’s efforts to more aggressively export its cultural assets with the 'Cool Japan' strategy the government released in June.
"Copyright holders spend a significant amount of human resources trying to manually detect pirated content online," Agency for Cultural Affairs official Keiko Momii said on Tuesday.
The pilot program will initially focus on pirated anime and manga but could be expanded to TV shows, music, films and stage theatre content produced in Japan.
The AI-driven program promises to overcome one of the most challenging barriers to eliminating pirate websites by automatically detecting identical, cloned or substitute websites that pop up almost immediately once an illegal website is removed in a kind of internet piracy whack-a-mole.
The initiative could have an outsize impact on Japan’s cultural exports, as gaming anime and manga export sectors generated ¥4.7 trillion (US$31.3 billion) in 2022, rivalling even the burgeoning microchip sector’s ¥5.7 trillion revenue (US$38 billion).