Summary of strategies by the Strategic Council on Intellectual Property

 The government's plans were decided at a meeting with the Strategic Council on Intellectual Property, which I chair. The following are my overall comments.

------------------

 Various policies regarding content were worked out, such as the establishment of funds and amendments to the Copyright Act, but it remains to be seen what the results are from now on. This year, discussions were made about domestic footing and overseas expansion, which form the 2 main pillars of the maintenance of digital networks and the strengthening of soft power. In order to delve deeply into these issues, 2 task forces were set up for archives and music respectively.

 As a result of the discussions, topics such as cloud services, open data, the computerization of education, the usage of archives, and the maintenance of music databases were brought up. How we put these into practice is the problem at hand. We expect much from the ability of the administration to execute these policies.

 A task force focusing on archives was created to promote their use and application with the target of the year 2020. At that point, measures regarding the use and promotion of orphan works were debated. Media that would be considered by the archive task force were specified to be films, music, comics, animated shows, games, and designs, with a desire to put efforts into pop culture.

------------------

 As such, the plans for this year were finally settled. However, the overseas market share of content in the domestic market was 3.8%, showing a decline.

This time, a music task force was established to consider policies regarding overseas expansion, with a desire to further the results of overseas expansion with music as a model.

We are also stressing on policies that coordinate between the fields of content, fashion, food, and sightseeing. I am also putting efforts into activities involving different industries, such as Tokyo Crazy Kawaii, and hope to continue creating such spaces at Takeshiba.

Read More

Summary of strategies by the Strategic Council on Intellectual Property

 The government's plans were decided at a meeting with the Strategic Council on Intellectual Property, which I chair. The following are my overall comments.

------------------

 Various policies regarding content were worked out, such as the establishment of funds and amendments to the Copyright Act, but it remains to be seen what the results are from now on. This year, discussions were made about domestic footing and overseas expansion, which form the 2 main pillars of the maintenance of digital networks and the strengthening of soft power. In order to delve deeply into these issues, 2 task forces were set up for archives and music respectively.

 As a result of the discussions, topics such as cloud services, open data, the computerization of education, the usage of archives, and the maintenance of music databases were brought up. How we put these into practice is the problem at hand. We expect much from the ability of the administration to execute these policies.

 A task force focusing on archives was created to promote their use and application with the target of the year 2020. At that point, measures regarding the use and promotion of orphan works were debated. Media that would be considered by the archive task force were specified to be films, music, comics, animated shows, games, and designs, with a desire to put efforts into pop culture.

------------------

 As such, the plans for this year were finally settled. However, the overseas market share of content in the domestic market was 3.8%, showing a decline.

This time, a music task force was established to consider policies regarding overseas expansion, with a desire to further the results of overseas expansion with music as a model.

 We are also stressing on policies that coordinate between the fields of content, fashion, food, and sightseeing. I am also putting efforts into activities involving different industries, such as Tokyo Crazy Kawaii, and hope to continue creating such spaces at Takeshiba.　

Read More

The Music Task Force and databases

 The Music Task Force is a task force commissioned under the Strategic Council on Intellectual Property, and is involved in the international expansion of the Japanese music industry. It is the first effort in studying policies with a focus on music. In the midst of the important subject of advancing the overseas expansion of content, it was established for specific discussions, with the music industry as a model case.

 Why music now? The government explains that the high prevalence of overseas expansion in music, coupled with the rising maturity of industry practices, makes music a suitable model. The industry was compelled to digitalize its content way before text and videos did the same, and quickly became globalized. Therefore, the structure of the industry has undergone huge changes. However, the scale of the Japanese music industry is such that it joins the American music industry as one of the two top music industries in the world, and such that overseas expansion has become an independent theme within the industry. Even without support from the government, it plans to handle digitization and globalization by itself. The plans are to use the music industry as a model to accomplish overseas expansion, and use that to influence other content areas.

However, careful attention should be paid not to business assistance, but to the maintenance of the basic foundations of the industry, as mentioned by President Sakomoto of Shochiku during discussions at an assembly. Giving assistance to businesses that rely purely on support from the authorities will bring about an inefficient allocation of resources, and will retain uncompetitive businesses. Growth strategies and the preservation of traditional culture must never be conflated with each other. It is important for the country to think carefully before choosing how to proceed.

 In light of this, the consolidated policies involve numerous facets, such as the establishment of overseas bases, the strengthening of copyright protection, and the nurturing of talent. Among these facets, the one that I am keeping my eye on is the construction of databases. Specifically speaking, the creation of a database that cuts across the entire music industry.

"Even within the country, there already exist providers that offer data from overseas, such as Sync Music, but in order to provide 'seasonal' information to local fan groups, there is a need to provide additional information, such as that about upcoming concerts, television broadcasts, and new album sales." (From written report)

Based on requests by the music industry, our research office manages and operates "Sync Music", and handles information regarding more than 2000 music artists. With this as a base, we plan to move towards new database concepts and support such next-generation infrastructure like this, as part of the government.

http://www.syncmusic.jp/wordpress/

We will begin to make our move.

Read More

Can Japan be a major archival nation?

 The government's Strategic Council on Intellectual Property has established an "Archive Task Force", and as its chairman, I have consolidated strategies for the propagation of digital property.

When one mentions archives, many things come to mind. Cultural properties, publications, and television programs. Games, animated shows, comics, and music. A multitude of different things exist ranging from public property to commercial property. This is the government's initial foray into considering all these things as a whole in an archival strategy.

Why archive now? There are two reasons for this.

Firstly, there would be an increase in political benefits. From a foreign affairs point of view, it is important to project a Cool Japan image in preparation for the Olympics. From a domestic point of view, the digitalization of education has been officially implemented, thus requiring infrastructure to be constructed for teaching materials. 2020 is the targeted year to achieve both of these.

The other reason lies in the trends of foreign strategic developments. The West, in particular, is incorporating such strategies in full force. Europe sees the handing down of its cultural properties as a way to control the hegemony, and thus is strengthening its efforts in official intervention. In comparison, American IT companies such as Google are moving towards global content management.

 There are numerous issues related to this. Firstly, we have the expansion of services. We will make retrieval systems, as well as the content itself, more comprehensive. In particular, I stress the need for open data, in other words the organization of metadata and the implementation of lateral communication between archival information from various genres. In addition, the main thing to take note in this policy is the close cooperation between the Strategic Council on Intellectual Property and the IT Strategic Headquarters.

The construction of economic models is another important theme. This issue tends to degenerate into arguments over doing something about cultural properties with the national budget, but the more important matter at hand is to develop and encourage the use of archives, which will be valuable to industries, as well as the general public. Whether this can be considered as a business is another issue at hand.

 How do we handle orphan works? How do we deal with copyright? These are important questions to think about. If we try to solve them with just the Copyright Act, it will require far too much time and costs. Instead, we should look into whether they can be operated as economic models, via methods such as the actual implementation of archives and business experiments using orphan works. If they indeed can be operated as such, then citizens will invest in them to start them up. I wish to attach great importance to this approach.

Read More

Discussing the Content Policy with Lawmakers

I was called to a content committee meeting with members of the diet to debate pop culture and Cool Japan. Here are the answers that I gave.

Q. How do you view the competitive power of Korea?

A. Korea’s strategy is clear. Since the administration of Kim Dae-jung, 1) Their strategy fuses content and home electronics, software and hardware. 2) Their strategy concentrates on the international marketplace. 3) Their strategy involves intense government support.

Japan has a lot to learn from their strategy.

Q. What should we do to enter foreign markets?

A. The government should concentrate on distribution. Japanese industry has not yet fully realized how to use the net. Also, Japan has very few broadcasting slots overseas. In the U.S., there are tens of channels in Chinese, 13 channels in Korean, but only one channel in Japanese.

Q. What is causing this problem?

A. I could offer copyright laws and piracy concerns as the issue. However, I believe that the biggest factor is lack of will. Companies that have eaten up the domestic market lack incentive to go for the international market. However, I believe that this situation has come to an end.

Q. Does the government need to be involved or should it be left to economics and culture?

A. Professor Joseph Nye has an international political theory of “Soft Power.” Content policy, even more than industrial policy, should be valued as a cultural and political policy as well. The government should be involved because content policy has more to do with culture than with industry, and is more about international relations than just domestic policy.

Q. Do you have any hints?

A. I hope that we will take advantage of the Tokyo Olympics. It’s an opportunity to distribute content overseas, improve the domestic infrastructure, and promote the expansion of content.

Q. Any other aspects of Japanese culture?

A. If you ask foreigners living in Japan what they would like to bring back to their own countries, they teach you many surprising things. For example, many people value our education system in which elementary students take turns on lunch duty serving their classmates. Also, whereas many people are afraid of the police in their home countries, in Japan anyone can feel comfortable asking them for help. These are things that foreigners would like to spread in their countries. I’m certain there are many more aspects of our culture that we are not yet aware of that can be presented to the world.

Read More

A debate on the future

 I was employed as director of the Japan branch of the international society of Research and Information on Public and Co-operative Economy, which is based on the Keio University Hiyoshi Campus. The main office is in Belgium. The theme is “ICT (Information and Communications Technology) in 2045.”

Many people have imagined what the future of our information society will look like. Many wild fancies have emerged about the High-Level Information Age, New Media Initiatives, Multimedia, Gigabit Societies, etc. Many of these things actually became reality, and in some cases reality has surpassed expectations.

Perhaps because of this, the energy put forth into surveying possibilities for the future seems to have been lost. As media has entered a tempestuous period, it is now the responsibility of academia to once again imagine possible futures.

As such, we gathered engineers, designers, and bureaucrats to a debate. I was the chairperson.

The reason for setting the goal 30 years in the future is that I thought 30 years ago was an important time. Media at the time consisted of telephone and television. A telephone network that had taken 100 years of preparation was complete, and the analog television networks covered the entire country. Then, in the mid-eighties, communications were deregulated and broadcast and satellite channels began to increase.

At the time there were four items on the policy agenda. Cheap, fast, beautiful, and profitable. Would telephone charges become cheaper? Would communication lines become faster? Would broadcast images become more beautiful? Would the media companies profit? The need for all of the items on this agenda has been lost.

Thirty years later, analog has come to an end. We now have PC, mobile, internet, and content throughout the world. The next stage involves multi-screen technology, the cloud, and social media. Once again, things are in disorder.

So then, let’s imagine the world 30 years from now. How will the social economy change? What will become of Japan? What role will IT play? Will its importance increase or diminish? These are the questions that I asked.

As can be expected, the conference ended without any concrete solutions. Listening to everyone’s opinions we could only confirm that media is in a state of chaos.

As children, we imagined a world of video phones and flying cars. Thirty years ago, we imagined a world where one could communicate at any time to anyone anywhere.

Now, the wants of the user have diversified, and we have the problems of cyber wars and flame wars. As technology improves we get to the point where machines can take the place of humans. The future is neither white nor black nor grey. It is still mottled.

Since the goal of the session was to share this situation, I believe that the goal was accomplished.

Read More

The future of digital

 This is the continuation of the presentation that I gave at the meeting on future policies in intellectual property.

 Professor Negroponte advocated bits over atoms and virtual over real, and that change has come about. A world beyond that is here. The trend is toward intelligence, wearable, and ubiquitous. Another way of putting it is, “Clever, always, everything.”

1)    Intelligence: (Clever)

Media creates content automatically without your interference. It acts as your autonomous agent, expressing and creating in the world of the net.

2)    Wearable: (Always)

Mobile brought us “anytime,” but with wearables the switch is never off. Now we have 24-hr (always) information. Tactile information and smells become content. Our pulses and brainwaves become content.

3)    Ubiquitous: (Everything)

Bits enter all atoms. Even towns become media and release information. Things produce information that leads to content.

 As a result of this, new problems arise. For example, to what extent can an agent represent us? How can we be held responsible for communications and contracts instigated by our agents?

 How will we protect privacy when wearable devices are always on, always gathering and accumulating information? How will we handle the right to cut off the ubiquitously accumulating flow of information?

 Also, how will we handle the rights of things? Does a “thing” that creates content hold the copyright? What will happen if a thing releases deceitful information? What happens when a robot controlled over the internet does a good deed or perpetrates a crime? Where does the responsibility lie?

 More and more issues will appear in the future, and these will require policy considerations. We must work to imagine what they will be and how to solve them.

Read More

Content up to the present

  I was asked to give a small presentation on the history of content to a meeting that was considering new policies for IP assets.

 The first musical instrument was made from the femur of a badger 43,000 years ago in Slovenia. It all starts with music. Next we had Altamira 18,500 years ago, and Lascaux 15,000 years ago. At the time, people thought and expressed themselves with images.

Letters weren’t invented until around 7000 B.C. So content developed from music to pictures to letters, and was limited to concerts or cave walls; single locations.

  Popularization of text was made possible by the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in 1455; of pictures by Niepce in 1826; and of music in 1877 with Edison’s invention of the phonograph. Basically, this took place in the reverse order of appearance. Moving pictures came on the scene in 1895 with the films of the Lumière brothers.

 The 20^th century was the era of telecommunications. With telephone and television, content and communication were freed from the constraints of time and place.

 The next transition period was 30 years ago. Nintendo’s famicon made it possible to play with pictures. Media continued to diversity from 1983 to 1985. In Japan it was called the New Media Boom. Media other than TV and telephone began to diversify and advance. Analog media diversified. In 1984, Steve Jobs released the Macintosh computer, beginning the age of the personal computer. Now anyone could create content with their desktop computer.

 Ten years later, in the 90s, a new movement emerged. In Japan it was called the multimedia boom.  Personal computers and mobile phones were popularized, and the internet spread.

 Information, movies, books, TV programs, music, and games all began to flow on top of the network, and the concept of “content” was born.

 The content industry was expected to be one of growth, but it didn’t live up to expectations. From 1995 to 2005 the market growth in Japan was 5.8%, which was equal to the growth of the GDP and not something one would necessarily call a “growth” industry. In recent days it has even begun to contract. On the other hand, the amount of data produced, by my calculations, has increased 21 fold.

 Now, in recent years, media is again in the midst of an upheaval for the first time in 20 years. 1) Devices have moved from TVs, PCs and mobile phones to smartphones, tablets, digital signage, and smart TVs. 2) The 20 year plan to digitize the domestic network has succeeded with terrestrial digital broadcasting and the cloud has been born. 3) While content as a service has been sluggish, social media has come to dominate.

 These three factors have changed the face of the world. In the face of this, we must wait to see what will become of intellectual property and content.

Read More

Want to visit a cool and pop country?

 Would you like to study in Japan? I took part in a PR event put on by Japanese universities geared toward UK students and talked about pop culture.

 In 2020, Tokyo will host the Olympics. Who should be at the opening ceremony? Toyota? Honda? Sony? That might work out, but they aren’t people. There aren’t any famous politicians. However, we could have Gundam, Son Goku, Pikachu, DeathNote, or Bleach. Japan is a country of pop culture.

My first trip overseas was to London in 1981. It was scary, and full of punks and motorcycle gangs. I was put in a horrible situation, but I was very stimulated, and when I returned to Japan I helped to form the band “Shonen Knife.” In the 90s Microsoft chose Shonen Knife after The Rolling Stones for use in their commercials, the band became world famous. Unfortunately, in the 20 years since then no other Japanese band has hit the world stage like that.

However, recently something strange has happened. Miku Hatsune was voted as the musician most people wanted to hear perform at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics. In the end, it didn’t happen and it was Paul McCartney who sang, but why did people vote for Miku Hatsune? She was born on the net of technology and culture. In the past 20 years Japan has transformed into a pop country.

Japanese pop culture isn’t just a matter of display. Take robots, for example. Inspired by manga and anime, living computers have been developed. Vending machines are another example. Japan is a vending machine paradise. One can purchase noodles, sushi, banana, eggs, and even underwear from a vending machine. These ubiquitous machines are also set to change digital media.

 “How about using media in the toilet, since this is a country with Washlets?” That was proposed, and SEGA made it a reality. Signage now competes for one’s attention while in the toilet. Industry is crazy enough to produce such a machine. That’s one reason that I recommend that you come to Japan to take part in a university-industry project.

 Adobe held a world-wide survey to determine the most creative countries. Japan was at #1 with 36%. The U.S. was #2 with 26%, and England was at 9%. In terms of creative cities, Tokyo received 30% of the vote, with New York at 21% and London at 8%.

 Please come to visit Tokyo!

Read More

Impressions of “TV is a Condition”

The chairman of the television union, Yutaka Shigenobu, published “Television is a Condition.” It’s a digital publication about the history and culture of television, and a theory of management.

 He showed recognition that the liberated “broadcast era” shifted to the “industrialized era” of the 80s, and accurately portrays how he fought against the “structured” era. It seems like quite a fight.

 The behind-the-scenes stories are interesting. Mr. Shigenobu invited the director of a movie about the Berlin Olympics, Leni Riefenstahl, to Tokyo. I was surprised to hear that Berlin Olympics gold-medalist marathoner Mr. Sohn Kee-chung arrived at the Haneda airport and left immediately after saying hello. I believe that a one-hour symposium could be held just on that story.

 The talk of wooing Jeanne Moreau in a 3-hr program on impressionism was also great. I want to see it. In 1981, Mr. Shigenobu was 40 years old. One is led to believe that great work should be accomplished while still young.

 There are stories of his time at the MIT Media Lab in 1985 when he interviewed Negroponte and Minsky. This was right after the lab was founded. I’d like to see that film.

 Mr. Shigenobu’s media and policy theories are interesting. He claims that “Digital” will represent the Renaissance-style revolution of the next generation. Personally I believe that rather than liken it to an industrial revolution, it should be seen as a cultural revolution.

 He also expressed frustration with Steve Jobs’ statement that, “We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.” and he gropes for a solution to this problem.

 The Fin-Syn (financial interest and syndication rules) in the U.S., television production rules in Britain, financial restoration policies for TV makers in France, and all such rules that separate broadcast and production all point out the low level of secondary use in Japan. They show that we can expect the arrival of a new environment that overcomes this problem. I too am waiting for this.

  However, the things that we can expect to arise from 2nd generation tools will not come out of media theory, rather from the individuals who regain control of media. It is people and software that will reproduce TV.

 Mr. Shigenobu believes that in Japan’s digital age, with the required technology and industry, society will transform even without revolutions or battles. One can see a new future in this. I am anxious to see the shape of this new future.

Read More