Study on Legal Control Procedure over Spread of Deepfake Movie by Japanese Civil Law

Abstract

Deepfake is a technology that replaces a face within a movie with the other's portrait that was extracted and synthesized from pictures or motion pictures including it. A trouble is caused on the actor, actress and other celebrities whose face is appearing on the fake movie in most cases. To claim a injunction of ceasing publication of the fake movie, the neighboring right, that is a property right, is no more effective because neural network does never keep traits of the performance in the course of reconstructing their faces, while it was well effective before rise of the deepfake technology since the performance on a movie had to be directly copied onto fake movies then. According to former judicial precedent with altered photograph, as far as the quality of alternation is so fine that people can take it as a reality, the personal right of portrait is the most likely effective instead, and the property right of publicity would be far less effective because most fake videos are not used for commercial item or advertisement. Nevertheless, Japanese jurisprudence explain the personal right shall be exercised directly by the holder and that makes entertainment office, which takes care of chores concerning the actors and actresses in Japan including resolve of legal trouble, difficult to handle the cases on behalf of them. In this situation that development of new technology caused legal inconveniences for industries, new law or new interpretation of law should be needed to solve the problem.