2015年6月16日火曜日

A Vision for Three Directions in Intellectual Property

 The government intellectual property agency has proposed an “IP Vision.” It summarizes the past 10 years of strategy and sets the strategy for the next 10 years. As chairman, I was responsible for coordinating this project.
In the beginning I wanted to talk about the importance of intellectual property to Japan and to outline the priorities contained in the proposal. The message would be called, “The importance of taking a global leadership role in intellectual property.”
For Japan to take a favorable position in this era of globalization with no natural resources and no access to cheap labor there is little choice but to rely on the production of intellectual property.
I wanted it to sink in that of all the country’s policies, the policy regarding intellectual property was of utmost importance.
The intellectual property strategy must be one of the pillars of the nation’s policies, right alongside national defense and education. In terms of industrial policy, it’s more important than agricultural or commercial policy. Even in TPP negotiations, it’s important to recognize that the IP field is essential to the future of Japan. I wanted to make those points as strongly as possible.
In regard to these three points, I set three paths.
1)     Policy Reform
 The top subject consisted of the promotion of three areas: user-created content, sharing and education, and big data. Ten years ago, the content policy was centered on the entertainment business, but for the next ten years it should address issues that involve the citizenry as a whole. Not only content produced by professionals, content made by everyone will take the lead.
 Japan’s strong point is everyone’s power; children and adults working creatively to produce movie and music. I want our policies to boost this. I’d like to describe the steps we made to improve the computerization of education. I lead the Association of Digital Textbooks & Teaching, and those involved were very interested. However, the dedication of the government is in question. At the same time, we concentrated on expanding the creation and use of content. The expansion of the content industry has great repercussions on industry as a whole.  It’s necessary to widen our field of vision with a GDP of 470 trillion yen, a 12 trillion yen content industry and an 85 trillion yen IT industry.
2)     Raising Priorities
 I clarified the manner in which resources would be allocated and prioritized. It is important to raise the priority of intellectual property strategy in the whole national policy. We needed to move from an agricultural and industrial society to an information society. It’s a thesis one might expect to hear from an elementary school student, but our policies were reversed for some reason. In a country without natural resources we have no choice but to rely on wisdom, and I wanted to reflect the importance of that in our policies.
3)     Development of Promotion Systems
Government must be unified in creating an all-encompassing promotion system. By getting eight government offices to the table to brainstorm measures we were able to advance cooperation. I think that this is a great achievement. What’s more, the “Cool Japan Promotional Council” has been established, along with the “Pop-Culture Subcommittee Meeting” that I was in charge of, and it’s important that we coordinate our policies.

Further cooperation is required. Of course it’s being discussed at the IT strategy division, but it’s natural that hardware and software should be thought of as a single unit. The nineties was the era of “Wintel” (Windows and Intel) and a time when hardware and software were divided, but recently we see the unification by Apple of the iPhone and iTunes; the advancement of Google’s strategy with web and Android; and Amazon’s assault with the Kindle. Japan must shape a strategy that considers the unification of IT and intellectual property as well.

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