Japan Plans AI Crackdown on Anime and Manga Piracy
Fighting piracy with artificial intelligence.
Japan is looking to combat anime and manga piracy using artificial intelligence. According to The Japan Times, the Cultural Affairs Agency has proposed a $2 million pilot program that will deploy an AI-powered image and text detection system to identify pirated content across websites.
“Copyright holders spend a significant amount of human resources trying to manually detect pirated content online,” said agency official Keiko Momii. The agency highlighted the challenges of keeping up with the rapid distribution of pirated material online. The pilot program is part of the agency’s supplementary budget request for this fiscal year.
Anime and manga piracy is a serious issue. Reports show that eight of the ten most pirated TV shows in 2023 were anime, and over half of pirated publishing content was manga. The Authorized Books of Japan (ABJ) revealed staggering losses in the manga industry, with $800 million lost in a single month in 2024.
While AI holds promise, its ability to detect all pirated content remains uncertain due to the vast number of sites hosting illegal material. Japan is not the only country fighting hard against piracy. For example, South Korea’s Kakao Entertainment employs a global anti-piracy task force, P.CoK, which claims it removed 270 million illegally hosted webtoon and web novel works in the first half of 2024.
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Rayan Sayyed is a staff writer for IGN India with a primary focus on Asian entertainment, spanning from anime, manga, and games to films and dramas from the East. You can reach out to him at [email protected], or find him on Twitter @rayanaver and Instagram @rayansayyed