(Tokyo) Japan wants to exploit artificial intelligence (AI) to fight against internet piracy of its cartoons and manga, confirmed the country’s cultural agency, which criticizes the “serious” damage inflicted on this industry of several billion dollars.
Published at 9:50 a.m.
And at present, “copyright holders devote a significant part of their human resources to trying to manually detect pirated content online,” Keiko Momii, a head of this organization, told AFP on Tuesday. Japanese.
But at this rate, content owners can “barely keep up” as illegal downloads continue to proliferate, according to the agency.
There are more than 1,000 websites illegally sharing Japanese manga for free, about 70 percent of which offer translations into foreign languages, including English, Chinese and Vietnamese, according to a group of Japanese publishers.
The situation has prompted “calls for automation of this process,” for AI to automate the identification of pirated content, Ms.me Momii, adding that the agency took inspiration from South Korea’s anti-piracy program, also aided by AI.
As part of this pilot initiative carried out under the aegis of the agency, the AI will be trained to search the internet for pirate sites, using its image and text detection system.
If successful, the system could be applied to other content sectors such as music and cinema, the agency said.
This 300 million yen ($2.8 million) strategy is included in the cultural agency’s proposed supplementary budget for the current fiscal year, which ends on March 31.
Japan, birthplace of world-famous manga such as Dragon Ball and video game series like Super Mario or Final Fantasyconsiders the creative industries as an engine of growth in the same way as steel and semiconductors.
In its revised “Cool Japan” strategy released in June, the government said it aimed to increase exports of such cultural goods to 20 trillion yen ($188 billion) by 2033.
In 2022, the Japanese video game, cartoon and manga sectors will earn the equivalent of nearly 30 billion euros from abroad, which is close to semiconductor exports, according to government data.
