JAPAN Trends and Developments Contributed by: Kenji Tosaki, Hiroki Tajima and Chie Komiya, Nagashima Ohno & Tsunematsu
AI and Copyright Developments in 2025 In 2025, discussions about AI and intellectual prop - erty rights continued to be widespread in Japan, as in many other jurisdictions. The following cases relating to AI and copyright have been notable in Japan in 2025. Note that the sources of the cases below are news articles and the authors have not independently verified them for their accuracy. Major Japanese newspaper companies filed a civil lawsuit against a generative AI business due to copyright infringement and unfair competition In August 2025, major Japanese newspaper compa - nies announced that they filed civil lawsuits against a US company providing generative AI-powered search services that reproduce plaintiffs’ articles and generate answers involving all or part of the creative expression thereof. The Asahi Shimbun Company and Nikkei Inc. jointly filed a civil lawsuit against the US company (the “ Asahi and Nikkei case ”), and three Yomiuri Shimbun Group entities filed another lawsuit against the same US company (the “ Yomiuri case ”). For both cases, the newspaper companies claimed that the generative AI business infringed their copy - right by reproducing and storing their articles on their servers (including paywalled articles) without authori - sation, and by repeatedly providing answers which included the contents of these articles to its users. For the Asahi and Nikkei case , the newspaper com - panies alleged that, although the newspaper compa - nies took technical measures to block access from the crawler by using “robots.txt”, the generative AI business ignored them and continued to use the con - tents of the articles. For the Asahi and Nikkei case , it was also alleged that the generative AI business provided false answers to its users while displaying their companies’ names and their articles as the refer - ence sources, which constitute “unfair competition” under the Unfair Competition Prevention Act of Japan. For both cases, the amount of damages claimed was around JPY2.2 billion (about USD14 million) in con - nection with the alleged copyright infringement and/ or alleged unfair competition, and an injunction was demanded to enjoin the reproduction and delivery of the articles by the said business. According to the Report on AI and Copyright Issues (published by the Legal System Subcommittee of
the Copyright Subdivision of the Council for Cultural Affairs of the Cultural Agency, on 15 March 2024), if the infringer ignores the copyright holder’s technical measures to prevent the reproduction of works for the training of AI, such action may constitute one of the elements whereby the interests of the copyright owner are unreasonably prejudiced. This is the first case in Japan in which major news media have filed a lawsuit against a generative AI business, and, therefore, future developments in this matter will be closely monitored. Criminal case regarding reproduction of images created by another person using AI In November 2025, a case was referred to prosecu - tors involving a man who had reproduced images that were originally made by another person using a generative AI called Stable Diffusion. The person who made the generative AI output stated that he had pro - vided detailed instructions to the generative AI and entered more than 20,000 prompts, and, therefore, the police determined that the images are copyrightable works and he owns the copyright that subsists in the images. It seems that this case was the first time that Japanese investigative authorities considered AI-gen - erated outputs to be within the scope of copyrightable works. As there have been no cases in which courts have found that AI-generated outputs are copyright - able, if a criminal case is filed with a court, a cardinal legal precedent could be established. Recent important court precedents on the validity of general tort claims in the absence of copyright protection Introduction The issue of whether or not a person can seek com - pensation of damages under a general tort law when that person cannot make a claim under intellectual property law has long been disputed in Japan. With respect to the issue, the Supreme Court of Japan ren - dered a ruling on 8 December 2011, with regards to a case where a television company broadcasted a por - tion of a film whose author is a North Korean citizen (Japan does not recognise North Korea as a state, therefore, such film does not fall under a “work” under the Copyright Act of Japan), that an act of using work that does not fall within any of the categories of works
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