Copyright and Fair Use

Japan's Amendment for Copyrighting

For many years, there have been laws and regulations controlling copyright infringement and preventing plagiarism from becoming an issue, particularly in education systems. The only exception to the rule is if the copyrighted material is either given willingly for someone else to use, if the material is used for educational purposes, or a limited amount of the material is used. All of these circumstances is referred to as fair use.

At the beginning of 2019, Japan made an amendment to the Copyright Act of Japan, it aims to improve and expand the limits that fair use has in place, particularly within the use of technology. According to lexology.com, these are the new guidelines, as stated below:

"1 Use of copyrighted works where their use is not perceivable.

Under the amended Copyright Act, companies will be able to record (reproduce) copyrighted works on databases so that the data can be used for the purpose of developing artificial intelligence (AI). Here the use will be permitted only so long as the AI uses the data for its machine learning purposes and the copyrighted work will not be perceivable when used. Further, copyrighted works can be used for the purposes of data verification, such as document search services and plagiarism checking services.

2 Ancillary use of copyrighted work on computers.

Companies may also reproduce copyrighted works for the purpose of caching on computers or for backup purposes.

3 Insignificant use of copyrighted works in relation to computer processing.

Internet search services are intended to be covered by this exemption. It has also been left intentionally vague so that it may cover new computer processing services that have yet to come into existence. The exemption may be relied upon so long as the use does not unfairly harm the interest of the copyright holder. The amended Copyright Act also provides various other exemptions such as: allowing easier access of copyright materials to persons with disabilities; museums and libraries will have slightly more flexibility on use of certain copyright materials; and some changes to treatment of orphan works where national and local governments will have more freedom to use such works." 

Because of these new laws, many hackers, as well as anyone else attempting to use any sort of copyrighted material posted on the internet, will no longer be able to use any loopholes that have been previously found to steal, copy, or do anything else of the sort with anybody's work that has been published.