The Change of Japanese Contents Policy 2/3

■The Change of Japanese Contents Policy　2/3

　UCバークレー大学にて講演した際のメモ、第2回。

2 Today

A) Change

  After the Democratic administration came into power in 2009 in Japan, contents policy started to change. In the beginning, I was critical of the government that was negative to competition. But after continuous criticizing, I was asked to join in making policy and am involved in many committees including the chairman of contents policy of Intellectual Property Strategy HQ.

  There are two points: From domestic market to overseas. From industry to infrastructure.

  From Domestic to Overseas is a short term policy. The government had focused on the expansion of the contents industry but on the contrary its domestic market is shrinking. We can no longer expect an expansion of contents market. The percentage of the revenue from the foreign market in the total revenue of contents is 17%, but only 3% in Japan. The government fixed 10% as a policy target. Japanese pop culture is called Cool Japan and very popular in the world, but Japan has not succeeded in making it into a big international business. They expect expanding markets, especially in Asia, through regulation to piracy and deregulation of import of Japanese contents by Asian countries.

 A Promotion approach that subsidizes industry is now difficult because of the fiscal circumstances, and it’s not effective either as an industrial policy because the budget tends to go to support traditional art sectors, not to the contents that have competitiveness. Instead, as a long term strategy, it is necessary to develop new contents through construction of infrastructure such as digital network environment and educational organizations.

  The construction of networks will accelerate the industry transition from analog contents to digital contents, and from packaged products to network delivery. In Japan, I think in this year, the market size of digital contents will become bigger than analog, and network delivery is becoming bigger than packaged.

 However, it’s not so easy totally. The second airing (re-runs) of TV programs is only 13%. That means, about 90% of TV contents are on air only once. That is the current TV business model in Japan. One policy target is to pull it up to 70% like the music and film industry.

B) Law & Biz

  One policy example of network construction is the so called “information communication law”. Five years ago, in order to urge development in new IT services, I made a proposal to the government to make a totally new legal framework for the convergence of Telecom and broadcasting that introduced a scheme allowing to use one frequency to both telecom and broadcasting, and also unified regulation framework of wired and wireless services.

  After that, after a lot of arguments and a lot of amendments, it came true as a series of legal systems last year. Four laws related to broadcasting were combined to one law as a contents law, and two laws related to IT service were combined to one.

  I will skip the details, but, because of this framework, new contents services are now being developed such as a delivery service of newspaper and magazines’ contents, with internet protocol, on digital TVs, radios, to digital signage, iPads, Kindles, and smart TVs.

  Copyright is more essential to contents than communication legal system. There are many agendas. Should the protection term be made longer or not? Should fair use be introduced or not? How can rights holders can be compensated regarding the expansion of digital copies? But Japanese copyright low is not created by politicians’ arguments but proposed to the Diet by the government after getting consensus between right holders and users. So, important issues always cause clinches and battles, and don’t get results even after taking years.

  Then these days, instead of changing the copyright law, a new approach is becoming the main trend such as making guidelines by private sector, and trying to find new business models through field experiments by stake holders. It’s an out-sourcing of policy issues.