Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs: AI system to be set up to detect pirate sites to avoid billions of dollars in economic losses

Japan suffers billions of dollars in economic losses each year from anime and manga piracy sites, with at least 1,000 sites currently illegally offering locally relevant free downloadable content, mostly manga. Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs has proposed a 300 million yen pilot program to track down pirate manga and anime sites using AI technology such as image and text recognition, which officials say is labor-intensive for copyright holders to manually search for pirated content and makes it difficult for them to cope with the proliferation of illegal content. The program has been included in a request for a supplementary budget for the current fiscal year (ending next March), and may be extended to other areas of pirated film, TV and music content if it is successful. In addition, Japan's game, anime and manga industry will generate 4.7 trillion yen in overseas revenue in 2022, which is close to the value of microchip exports.