The Japanese cultural agency criticizes the “serious” damage inflicted by piracy on the manga and cartoon industry, which is worth several billion dollars. And at present, “copyright holders devote a significant part of their human resources to trying to manually detect pirated content online,” Keiko Momii, an official at AFP, told AFP on Tuesday. this Japanese organization. But at this rate, content owners can “barely keep up” because illegal downloads continue to proliferate, according to the agency.
There are more than 1,000 websites sharing Japanese manga for free and illegally, 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” of AI automating the identification of pirated content, Keiko Momii said, adding that the agency took inspiration from the South’s anti-piracy program -Korean, also AI-assisted.
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 (1.8 million francs) strategy is included in the cultural agency’s proposed supplementary budget for the current fiscal year, which will end on March 31.
Japan, cradle of world-famous manga such as “Dragon Ball” and video game series like “Super Mario” or “Final Fantasy”, considers the creative industries as an engine of growth in the same way as steel and semi-finished products. -drivers. In its revised “Cool Japan” strategy published in June, the government said it intended to increase exports of these cultural goods to 20,000 billion yen (118 billion francs) 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.
