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.