The police of Miyagi Prefecture (Tohoku, northeastern Japan) made Japan’s first arrest of those alleged to be producing “fast movies” in violation of the Copyright Act, on June 23, 2021. What is this all about? The “fast movie” (ファスト映画, fast-eiga)…
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The Plant Variety Protection and Seed Act (PVPSA), revised at the end of 2020, was the downfall of a man who had been propagating and selling a variety of popular muscat grapes (“Shine Muscat”) that are registered and protected by…
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As reported in 2019, several leaders of the once-popular Manga-Mura (Manga comic village) portal of illegal manga data were arrested and tried. Finally, on June 2, 2021, Hoshino Romi was convicted for his role in uploading content passed along to…
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The Japan Patent Office (JPO), considered one of the top five patent offices in the world, published its revised Mission, Vision, and Values statement on June 15, 2021. The English version shared on the JPO website is as follows: ＜Mission＞…
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Leaders of eleven top Japanese companies met on May 31, 2021 to plan a new cooperative corporation to coordinate nationwide advances in quantum technology and applications. The group intends to initiate a formal corporate establishment meeting this summer. The participating…
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Following the May 13 passage of revisions for the Patent Act, May 25, 2021, a bill for smoothing out copyright issues for digital distributions passed the Upper House (House of Councillors) unanimously. The Copyright Act is being updated to: 1)…
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Old shopping checkouts are vanishing in UNIQLO, which is famous in Japan and now outside of it for its casual apparel retailing. In recent years it gained attention for its automated checkout scanning systems, where the customer can place the…
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On May 13, 2021, a bill for further expanding information technologies in Japanese intellectual property, passed the Upper House (House of Councillors) unanimously. This is one of a wave of bills being passed for reforms to digitize Japanese life, symbolized…
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Clarivate, global IP analyst, sets out annually to find the world’s largest innovation engines. This year, it issued its tenth Top 100 Global Innovators” awards. This year, The USA was represented by 41, but East Asia combined rivaled its numbers….
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Due to the “fourth wave” of novel coronavirus cases in Japan, Tokyo as well as some western prefectures of Japan were declared under yet another State of Emergency from April 25 to May 11. The relatively rigorous following of warnings…
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