Content to be converted

 Intellectual Property Division Content Specialist Committee. The committee bundles government policies on content and forms action plan, known as the “Intellectual Property Plan”. The division was formed 10 years ago, and I have been working as the chairman for five years, being involved in intellectual property planning. 

 Looking at the flow right now, while the world content market is expanding by 6% every year, the Japanese market is expected to shrink. On the other hand, based on my calculations, information dissemination in Japan has increased by 30 times in the past 10 years. With the increase in activity in M2M (machine –to-machine) and big data, this increase can be expected to move at faster pace. 

 However, according to McKinsey, information that has been ‘accumulated’ in Japan within the past 10 years does not exceed 11% of the volume in the United States. Although there is indeed new information, these are not stored as intellectual properties. Big data is also not being leveraged. Although traditionally, countries are set in their pursuit of industrial scale expansion, it has become important to also look at information amount and behavior. 

 The content policy has changed within these three years. 

１ More than the copyright system, policy moved from a defensive to an offensive stance with developing projects.

２ Infrastructure rather than entertainment: more focus is put in infrastructure and human resource development. 

３ Overseas expansion beside just domestic. 

 I believe this direction is correct. 

 There will emphasis on the following three in the future:

1. Strengthening of overseas expansion

Drastic measures such as buying media frame overseas and abolishing import restrictions are needed. 

2. Development of domestic infrastructure

 This is a long-term, bottom-up plan. Full implementation of digital textbooks, open data: A big-boned policy such as making government-owned data open and free for usage is necessary. 

3. Government integration

  Due to government integration in the past few years, all eight ministries such as the arts, general affairs, economics and others have been coming together around a single table to discuss about future initiatives. This might be the greatest achievement that has been attained in the past 10 years. I would like to continue advancing this. In particular, the combination of content policy and IT policy is a point which we should consider. Political power is also required for this.