Article 29 of the Act on Regulation of Transmission of Specified Electronic Mail (hereinafter “Article 29”) allows the Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications to ask for information on senders of certain electronic mail from telecommunications service providers. It is generally understood that the abovementioned information corresponds to information on subscribers, which is allegedly not covered as “secrecy of communications.” As far as this interpretation is concerned, it appears that the relationship between Article 29 and secrecy of communications does not raise any problem. In my view, however, secrecy of communications under the Constitution of Japan protects not only content and metadata of respective communications but also ensures a sound institutional environment for such communications. As part of such an environment, some subscriber information that is closely relevant to metadata such as email addresses are constitutionally protected. However, it is in institutional environments where network safety is not ensured and thus content of communications is readily leaked to others that we find problems in the protection of the secrecy of communications even if there is no problem with the handling of the content or metadata itself by service providers. From this perspective, it is not fair to say that information in Article 29 does not include any “secrecy”, i.e., content and metadata of email communications. It is more reasonable to assume that the acquisition of information based on Article 29 by the Communications Minister is justified as a measure to effectively protect the secrecy of communications of the general public as a whole.

In this paper, I propose several ideas regarding the legal personhood for Artificial Intelligence. First, legal entities for Artificial Intelligence will be expected to limit the responsibilities of related business parties. Second, even for corporations that are controlled by Artificial Intelligence, it will not be necessary to dispense with shareholders and directors. Third, if Artificial Intelligence which has been established as a legal person under foreign law comes to Japan, it will be possible to protect transaction safety through the choice of laws and the laws on foreigners.

The current development of information and communication technologies, such as the rapid popularization of the Internet and increasingly fast lines of communication, has dramatically changed the creative industries' business model. One of the noteworthy changes is the large increase in the distribution of a Freemium business model. Freemium is a new business model: a basic service is provided free of charge, but money is charged for virtual goods or other value-added functions. However, many economists and company managers are concerned about the substitution effect: consumers whose consumption is satisfied through free goods stop purchasing paid goods, causing revenues from paid goods to decrease. In this paper, I discuss the impact of free digital distribution on the number of physical sales in the music industry from the view point of complementary effects and substitution effects.

The results showed that the complementary effect of free digital distribution is greater than the substitution effect, so free digital distribution has a significant positive impact on the number of physical sales in the music industry. It was found that the number of physical sales increases by about 0.19% when free digital distribution views increase by 1%. In addition, short term free digital distribution does not have a significant positive effect, but long term free digital distribution does. Furthermore, the number of physical sales which resulted when free digital distribution was provided was significantly larger than when free digital distribution was not provided. From the above, it is proposed that music companies should provide long term free digital distribution.

In September 2016, the European Commission proposed a new draft Directive to provide publishers of press publications with neighbouring rights in order to achieve a fairer allocation of revenues accrued from the distribution of the copyright-protected contents between online platforms and publishers of press publications such as newspaper companies. This proposal is intended to improve the bargaining power of these press publishers in negotiations with online platforms. However, taking into consideration the fact that the online platforms are important portals for access to the websites of the press publishers, these publishers would face a "prisoners' dilemma", so that it is possible that the situation would not be significantly changed.