Tokyo: A Japanese newspaper industry group asked the government Friday to swiftly consider a law revision to fully protect their news articles from use in artificial intelligence development.

The Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association submitted an opinion to the Cultural Affairs Agency that a government panel subcommittee’s draft view on copyright protection from generative AI is good to some extent but not enough for full copyright protection for their news content.

“The current legal interpretation is not enough to protect the rights related to the content,” the opinion read.

Over the development of generative AI tools, the copyright law allows copyrighted works to be used for AI learning without permission in principle, unless copyright owners’ interests are infringed unreasonably.

“News content is valuable intellectual property created with a great deal of effort and cost,” the association said, adding that free-riding by AI developers is “unacceptable.”

The draft view of the Cultural Affairs Council subcommittee states that collecting news content data from websites is considered unreasonable infringement of the interests of copyright holders, if the holders look likely to sell the content data to developers and the data are collected by bypassing technical measures taken to prevent AI learning.

“This is an interpretation that puts a brake to some extent” on the collection of data from newspaper websites without permission, the industry group said.

On concerns that the draft’s interpretation of the copyright law may lead to delays in AI development in Japan, the association said: “This is hardly a convincing argument. AI developers have only to obtain permission, pay the right price and use copyrighted works fair and square.”

JIJI Press