Japan Looking to Revise the Unfair Competition Prevention Act

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) intends to submit a bill to revise the Unfair Competition Prevention Act into the ordinary session of the Japanese Diet this year.
This reform bill is aimed to design and protect the distribution of “valuable data”.
“Valuable data” includes paid data provided by meteorological data service companies, measurement data of road shapes for maps or automatic driving, and experimental data provided by manufacturers for AI development projects.

Under the current laws, it has been difficult to protect valuable data because such data is not regulated by or protected under either Patent law or Copyright law. Moreover, any data that is supposed to be shared cannot meet the conditions needed to be classified as trade secrets. This means that there is no law to provide remedies for unfair use. However, this valuable data is easy to duplicate and distribute, and once the data has been illegally circulated, the damage can spread rapidly and extensively.

Last December, a public commenting period was opened to the public, and a working group was launched for creating a preliminary draft of the guideline to clarify the new system’s details was launched. Going forward, METI will continue to consider issue and concerns before submitting the bill to the Diet.