Report from Nippon.com
In Brief – The Japan Fair Trade Commission, the country’s competition regulator, has announced an investigation as to whether online search services that use generative artificial intelligence to craft responses could constitute an abuse of a dominant bargaining position under Japan’s antimonopoly law. The Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association, like many news media organizations around the world, has expressed concern that these services could prevent users from visiting news providers’ websites, thereby reducing their revenue. The antitrust regulator is expected to review search services provided by US technology giants Google and Microsoft, chatbot leader OpenAI, startup Perplexity AI which offers a generative AI search engine, and Japan’s LY Corp.
Context – All AI company uses of copyright content are not alike. On one hand are issues around training the large language models that underpin chatbots. Lawsuits brought by authors and publishers will likely determine if training violates US copyright law or is a “fair use”. Two federal judges released battling court opinions last summer. US litigation will be closely watched around the world, especially by governments, including in Japan, looking to strike a balance between domestic AI developers and local copyright industries. As the battles over AI training play out, chatbots and internet search are functionally merging, creating new issues. Google, for example, increasingly provides an AI-generated “answer” response alongside traditional links, while chatbot queries are replacing some traditional searches. Online content, including news, is key to timely answers, and publishers argue the shift to more complete answers changes the copyright calculus underpinning traditional online search. While chatbot developers are fighting the lawsuits about pay for AI training, some, including Google, OpenAI and Meta, are making deals that will pay some publishers to include their content in chatbot results. Perplexity, with smaller budgets and a business model from day one claiming to be just a new search engine, is a top target for media lawsuits.