Faced with the proliferation of illegal downloads of anime and manga from the Internet – a real scourge causing « graves » damage to the industry – the Japanese cultural agency announced that it wanted to exploit artificial intelligence (AI) to fight against the phenomenon.
« Copyright owners spend a significant amount of their human resources trying to manually detect pirated content online.said Tuesday, December 3 Keiko Momiia manager of the Japanese organization, to the AFP. Currently, the proliferation of illegal downloads is such that content owners can “ barely follow » the pace, according to the agency.
A proliferation of illegal downloads
And for good reason: to date, there are more than 1,000 websites sharing Japanese manga for free and illegally, about 70% of which offer translations into foreign languages, including English, Chinese and Vietnamese, according to a group of Japanese publishers.
The situation gave rise to “ calls for automation of this process ”, involving the use of AI to enable the identification of pirated content, said Keiko Momiiadding that the agency took inspiration from South Korea’s anti-hacking program, also aided by AI.
As part of this pilot initiative, conducted 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.
A lucrative industry
This strategy, whose cost is estimated at 300 million yen (1.9 million euros), is taken into account in the cultural agency’s proposed supplementary budget for the current fiscal year, which will end on March 31st.
Cradle of world-famous manga like Dragon Ballor video game series like Super Mario or Final Fantasy, Japan considers creative industries as an important engine of growth, in the same way as steel or 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 (127 billion euros) by 2033. By 2022, the Japanese video game, cartoon and manga sectors have garnered the equivalent of nearly 30 billion euros from abroad.
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