April 2016 to March 2017

Authors/Persons in charge:
Yukimasa Sasaki (Senior Fellow, Institute for International Socio-Economic Studies)

 Lately with the introduction of IoT we are observing a sharp increase of number of “things” connected with Internet. Starting from personal belongings such as Smartphone, glasses, watches the “things” are extended to home electric appliances and cars, production facilities at factory, medical systems. By connecting or networking these things in the internet, the enormous amount of data is being exchanged out from these things. The rapid development of AI technology accelerates the processing and utilization of the data. The companies can be benefited with these data collected to create new business value and to improve their business competitiveness, but, the new problem occurs under this situation that existing IPR system is not well organized nor reviewed to cope with such new development or objects artificially created by AI.

 In this report we outlined in the first half of the year the legal issues brought up in the area of IoT, Big Data and AI from the view point of personal information protection and potential risks by AI and also how the overseas countries are trying to challenge the issue. In addition to them we covered the cases of utilization of data in the business and experiments such as PDS (Personal Data Service/Store) to promote the utilization of data.

 In the second half of the year we continued to monitor the development of arguments and debates in the study group within the Japanese Government on the promotion of the utilization of data.

 We collected the cases where the acquisition of companies or the collaboration with the companies is mainly based on the purpose of utilizing the data the other has the possession of. We specially put our focus on the globally acknowledged companies such as IBM and Google in this field.