This paper considers the aspect of "AI as a tool". Considering the premise that works are created by humans, and the quality and accuracy of the current generation AI, the final cut must be made by humans, and society's recent doubts about the use of generation AI output as the final product are not surprising. On the other hand, it is already being actively utilised as an intermediate process and as an intermediate good, and is considered to be contributing to creative options and improved work efficiency.The tools of AI are,

i) Encouraging interest and participation in creative activities by amateurs and hobbyists, as seen in the UGC, some of whom have produced excellent products,

ii) Those can take away the work of some paid staff, but

iii) It may also lead to an overall improvement in the efficiency of the more tedious parts of professional work.

The nature of iii) as opposed to i) and ii) as AI evolves is a trade-off against industry expansion, and there are many management issues in balancing AI evolution and industry expansion, including how to utilise AI, the quality of the products and the career paths of personnel.

The technological evolution of generative AI has accelerated rapidly since 2022, paving the way for a new content economy that engages users. The emergence of deep learning techniques in 2016, specifically the Transformer, heralded advancements in unsupervised learning where machines learn automatically when provided with data. Represented by the advent of ChatGPT in 2022, technologies that auto-generate new content are on the brink of rapid evolution across diverse media. The advancements in deep learning, practical applications of speech and image recognition, and the integration of these technologies signify an era where creative tasks traditionally performed by humans, such as writing, drawing, music composition, filming, and editing, are being replaced by AI. This shift suggests a potential transition in content creation from professional creators to the general public, foreseeing a shift in the content economy from a creator-centric to a user-centric perspective.

Content created by AI is termed AIGC (AI Generated Content). It's crucial to discuss the kind of ecosystem this will create. AIGC could potentially disrupt the ecosystems of professionals known as creators, including scriptwriters, animators, actors, and more. Japan boasts unique cultures, such as globally successful media franchises centered around character content like Pokémon and user-driven content distribution markets. Hatsune Miku serves as a prime example. The combination of digital technology advancements, active user participation, fan enthusiasm, and flexible copyright management has created a fertile ground for integrating generative AI effectively into Japanese businesses. It's anticipated that the fusion of social media and generative AI will lead to the integration of User Generated Content with AIGC, expanding globally. However, the use of generative AI technology comes with various challenges, including copyright issues and ethical dilemmas. Instead of generative AI technology and human creators being at odds, their coexistence and collaborative creation of new content forms will be key to the future growth of the content industry.

At the onset of the Internet economy, there was great optimism that user-centric business models would evolve due to enhanced capabilities in user information searches. However, with the rise of targeted marketing fueled by cloud computing and related technologies, a supplier-centric economic landscape emerged. While this has resulted in a highly convenient society, concerns are intensifying over the infringement of users' rights in favor of sponsors' profits. More recently, technologies such as Web 3.0 and self-sovereign identity have been proposed to counter this issue. When paired with government regulations and innovative business models, these measures are anticipated to pave the way for a digital society that safeguards user rights. Maebashi Digital Garden City stands out as an early adopter of self-sovereign architecture, with a goal of protecting the desires and interests of its citizens.

This paper (i) proposes the "rules (regulations)" necessary for the research and development, use, sale and supply of AI systems and services, (ii) respects voluntary efforts to comply with them, (iii) establishes "rules (harmonised standards, technical standards and requirements)" to act as "de facto mandatory standards" in the sale and supply of services, (iv) establishes management system standards to plan, implement, check and act on them, (v) establishes a legal basis for disciplining these mechanisms, and (vi) establishes the 'AI Supervisory Commission (tentative name)', (vii) which will unveil the concept of AI regulation with the 'Japanese AI System Conformity Assessment System'.

On the other hand, instead of continuing the trial-and-error approach of considering soft law, which is expected to be exclusively self-disciplining and may not need to be observed, the aim is to overcome the resistance to hard law associated with the introduction of regulations (such as legal prohibitions on substantive issues), against which there are persistent objections, and to address the issues of principles and guidelines that have been discussed so far. To achieve this goal, this paper attempts to move away from the theory of law and regulation avoidance, which leaves compliance to voluntary initiatives and does not regulate through hard law, to 'optimise' AI regulation in the light of international trends, and to propose new measures that will contribute to future AI regulatory policy in the research, development and use of AI.

In the world of the Metaverse, there is a problem under what conditions the designs of industrial products can be protected by intellectual property laws. By utilizing AI in the production of UGC, a large number of designs for a wide variety of industrial products will be reflected in some form in the final product, so it is necessary to clear intellectual property rights related to industrial products. Therefore, in this article, I will clarify the problems when applying design patents and copyright protection to the world of Metaverse without limit for the design of industrial products, and also discuss several issues of Article 2, Paragraph 1, Item 3 of the Unfair Competition Prevention Act, which was amended in 2023 to cover the protection of designs of industrial products within the world of the Metaverse. In conclusion, this paper believes that in order to protect a world where no infringement occurs without access, we should oppose the expansion of protection for design patents to the Metaverse and rely on the regulation against slavish imitations of UCPA.

This paper considers whether the operator behind an avatar active in a metaverse may be granted conceivable personality rights or interests with regard to the maintenance of personality identity via use of the avatar. The ordering of a metaverse requires mechanisms to legally protect a person who is a victim of identity fraud. Such protection is theoretically supported by “the self-image control right,” “the right pertaining to self-image identity,” having been discussed in the context of the Constitutional rights and “the identity right” in the form of “the right to maintain personality identity in relations with other persons.” Although these right concepts are not firmly established, they can at least serve as the basis for ordering through soft law. As metaverses expand in the future and we reach a stage of social consensus-building that requires legal protection by hard law, it is possible that the abovementioned right concepts will develop into rights under positive law.

Social networking services (SNS) have become a crucial tool for communication and information sharing in Japan, with over 80% of internet users relying on them for social purposes. As such, any infringement on SNS use can significantly affect the social lives of individuals. Consequently, there have been calls to protect the use of SNS through legal means. One approach is to apply the public forum doctrine (PF doctrine) to SNS, which would allow private individuals to use property that can be considered a forum, and require administrators to tolerate such use, thereby promoting freedom of expression as a constitutional value. Although some precedents have applied the PF doctrine to SNS, this paper argues that the doctrine's applicability to SNS is questionable. Specifically, the paper contends that the PF doctrine may not be necessary to protect the interests of users and that it may hinder a proper balancing of competing interests. To support this argument, the paper posits the hypothesis that the PF doctrine should only apply when the counter-interests to freedom of expression are limited and less valuable than the freedom of expression itself. Using U.S. Supreme Court cases as a benchmark, the paper demonstrates that this hypothesis holds. Then, the paper shows that the interest situation surrounding SNSs does not satisfy these functional conditions. Therefore, it concludes there is no reason to apply the PF doctrine to SNSs under Japanese law. Instead, the paper proposes that the legal regulation of SNSs should focus on analyzing their characteristics as a forum for expression and the interests of stakeholders.

On 20 October 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice in conjunction with 11 states filed a Complaint against Google LLC in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for violations of the Sherman Act. Complaint alleges that Google is the monopoly in the markets of general search services, the search advertising, and the general search text advertising and that Google's conducts have resulted in maintenance of the monopoly power in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act.

On 18 July 2018, on the other side of the Atlantic, the European Commission issued a decision against Google's business model for Android OS and fined Google €4.3 billion. The decision found that Google was a monopoly in the market for licensing of smart mobile operating systems (Android OS market), the market for Android app stores, and the market for general search services and that its specified conducts had constituted violations of Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union so as illegally to maintain and strengthen Google’s dominant position in the market for general search services.

The U.S. DOJ's suit against Google is in the middle of the pre-trial proceedings and has yet to begin a trial, so that Google's conducts enumerated in Complaint are still allegations by DOJ. This article is aimed to give an overview of Google's business doings in the specified markets through DOJ's Complaint, with a short review on anti-competitive issues related therein.

Whether or not internet streaming services classify as "broadcasting" that requires a license has been intensely debated in Germany for the past few years. This question must be primarily examined with reference to the concept of "broadcasting" as defined in the Interstate Media Treaty (Medienstaatsvertrag) which came into effect on November 7, 2020. Even in cases where streaming media are classified as broadcasting according to the Interstate Media Treaty, however, they may not necessarily need a broadcasting license to offer their services. In other words, § 54 of the Interstate Media Treaty allows for "license-free" broadcasting, i.e. for exceptions to the principle of mandatory licensing. By this provision the Interstate Media Treaty attempts to resolve to some extent the issues surrounding the concept of "broadcasting" and the distinction between broadcasting and streaming media services. This paper analyzes the details of the provision regarding "license-free" broadcasting referred to in § 54 of the Interstate Media Treaty as well as the procedures and criteria for "license-free" broadcasting.

In today's digital society, it has become increasingly common for users (consumers) to receive digital content and services in exchange for providing their personal data. In contrast to the widespread use of this business model, its legal regulation remains incomplete. In the terms and conditions of content and service providers, such contracts are generally positioned as "free of charge." However, the reality is that operators use personal data provided by users to generate revenue, which is also important in determining the legal nature of these agreements. How should such contracts be handled from a legal perspective? This is important in various aspects, for example, with respect to what remedies should be made available to users (especially when they are consumers) in case of non-conformity of content or services.

In the EU, this phenomenon has been partly dealt with, and consumers are given the same remedies for non-conformity of digital content, etc. as if they had paid the price (money, etc.). At the same time, in EU law, it is emphasized that the protection of personal data is a fundamental right, and it is made clear that the above-mentioned legal treatment does not commoditize personal data. On the other hand, new issues have arisen due to the intersection of contract law and personal data protection law, as personal data is positioned as consideration in contracts. Specifically, the main question is how the content of regulation regarding contract law and that regarding personal data influence each other.

In this paper, the author first reviews the developments in EU consumer law leading up to the adoption of the Digital Content Supply Directive. Then, as a premise for the analysis, the author provides an overview of the Digital Content Supply Directive and related directives (such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)). As a core part of this paper, the author examines the relevant contracts and their effects from multiple perspectives regarding the positioning of personal data as compensation under the Digital Content Supply Directive. The analysis in this paper is intended to contribute to future related discussions in Japanese law, and furthermore, to discuss the increasingly prominent relationship between contract law (and consumer protection law) and personal data protection law in EU law and Japanese law. This will be positioned as a first step in further analyzing such intersections.

In the field of privacy and personal data protection, the "consent principle" or the "notice and choice approach" has traditionally been emphasized. Recently, however, with the spread of information technologies such as IoT, Big Data, and AI, it has become increasingly difficult to achieve effective consent.

Such changes in the information environment also have an impact on the legal theory of the right to privacy. Traditionally, the so-called "right to control one's own information" has been the prevailing theory in Japanese constitutional jurisprudence regarding the right to privacy. However, in recent years, due to the above-mentioned changes in the information environment, there have been various views that criticize the theory of the right to control one's own information and advocate a theory of the right to privacy that differs from this theory.

As described above, academic theories on the right to privacy are becoming increasingly confused, but there is a common trend among them to some extent. That is, the right to privacy is viewed from pluralistic grounds. If we take a pluralistic view of the grounds for the right to privacy, it would be straightforward to pluralize the content of the right to privacy as well. This paper attempts to pluralize and categorize information privacy rights.

In conclusion, this paper argues that the right to privacy should be categorized as follows. First, the right to privacy is broadly divided into three categories: information privacy, decisional privacy, and spatial privacy. Then, information privacy rights are divided into three categories: (1) the right to control one's own information, (2) the right to appropriate handling of one's own information, and (3) the right to keep one's private information secret.

In light of the changes in the environment surrounding broadcasting in recent years, Amendments to the Broadcasting Act and the Radio Act, which was approved by the 211th ordinary session of the Diet, offers domestic basic broadcasters the following measures to ensure that they will continue to play their social roles in broadcasting in the future while improving the efficiency of their business operations: (i) they can operate the simultaneous broadcasting of programs in multiple target regions for broadcasts; (ii) they can use relay station facilities jointly; and (iii) they can operate broadcasting management system more ensurely.

With regard to (i), the Government will revise the approval system for the Business Infrastructure Reinforcement Plan and establish a system under which domestic basic broadcasters in different target regions for broadcasts can simultaneously broadcast the same program in regions, including those designated by the Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications as regions where a decline in demand for domestic basic broadcasting services is recognized, regardless of their individual business conditions, under certain conditions, such as by taking measures to ensure regionality.

With regard to (ii), in order to make it possible for multiple specified terrestrial basic broadcasters to increase the efficiency of their business operations by jointly using relay station facilities, the Act will allow specified terrestrial basic broadcasters to conduct terrestrial basic broadcasting operations using relay stations of other parties (suppliers of basic broadcasting stations) after confirmation by the Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications.In addition, in areas designated by the Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications as areas where there is a particularly high need to improve the efficiency of the terrestrial basic broadcasting operations of the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), only the subsidiary of NHK will be able to own and manage relay stations and use them for the terrestrial basic broadcasting operations of the NHK. The transfer of NHK's broadcasting equipment to the subsidiary will be an exception to the Broadcasting Act’s restriction on the transfer of broadcasting equipment of NHK.

With regard to (iii),the basic broadcasters and basic broadcasting station suppliers will be obliged to maintain the broadcasting management system for operating the facilities ,including that operated by outsourcees, in compliance with the standards specified by the Ordinance of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. And by adding matters pertaining to the outsourcing of the operation of facilities to the matters stated in the application for approval of basic broadcasting operations and license of basic broadcasting stations, the Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications will be able to grasp the actual status of the outsourcing.