[Provisional Translation]

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe held a meeting of the Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters at the Prime Minister’s Office.

During the meeting, the members of the Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters approved the Intellectual Property Promotion Plan 2016.

Following the approval, the Prime Minister said,

“We have just approved the Intellectual Property Promotion Plan 2016.

This plan will revise the copyright system to make it possible to use copyrighted works under set conditions in order to promote the collection and usage of big data toward a fourth industrial revolution. Moving forward, we will continue to consider the extent of intellectual property rights and for whom they will be granted, in relation to creative works such as music and novels produced by artificial intelligence.

Our aim is for every person in Japan to be able to produce and use highly creative intellectual property. To that end, we will establish an industry-academia-government consortium and undertake intellectual property educational initiatives at the primary school-level in order to foster correct knowledge about intellectual property among children. Furthermore, we will also provide support for the strengthening of intellectual property strategies at regional companies as well as small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

We will continue to promote public-private partnerships that conduct matching programs to bring together media content such as anime with monodzukuri (manufacturing), food, and tourism initiatives, in order to give birth to new businesses.

I believe we must not limit ourselves to merely ‘protecting’ Japan’s intellectual property. Instead, the Government will work as one to promote our intellectual property strategy, so that we can make use of our intellectual property, and strongly support those from companies and universities who take on the challenge of seeking to produce innovation.”