Japan is spending $2 million on AI to combat anime piracy.

Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs would bring forth an investment of around 300 million yen, roughly equal to 2 million USD, in the development of a highly advanced AI-based system to tackle the piracy of the anime material themselves.

The system will automatically identify sites that distribute pirated anime, and facilitate the removal of that INBD content for the copyright holders. This is intended to possibly eliminate the practice of anime piracy in the future and will be greatly reduced. By estimates provided by the Agency, these amounts seem to be astronomical, considering that losses due to piracy approach around 2 trillion yen or roughly about 13.32 billion dollars every year.

As battle against piracy gains momentum, it appears to become glaringly evident that the application of artificial intelligence may be among the more productive ways to address this issue. The traditional, manual ways of tracking and identifying pirated content have always been labor intensive, time-consuming, and expensive, as well as not very effective. In response, the Agency plans to develop an algorithm, which will be trained using a variety of official copyrighted materials supplied by publishers and copyright holders. Such training would also involve in-depth analysis of the layouts and advertisements featured on typical piracy websites, thus making the system better able to recognize and act against unlawful distribution.

There are arguments surrounding the role of artificial intelligence in some industries, but that would obviously have much to do with the anime and manga industries. Their challenges have become quite serious-or, to say, piracy has become the top priority of countermeasures for them. The specific budget for this system countermeasure is included in the supplemental budget proposal for the year. However, it should be emphasized that the actual development and implementation of the AI system may take time. The system would have to be established as effective and reliable. But then again, in itself, this could nearly eliminate anime piracy in the coming years, depending on how well it can work out in practice.

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