報道によれば、米国当局が日本企業に対して、米国で獲得したデータやブランド価値などの知的財産から得た利益について納税を迫っているそうだ。 US pushes Japan Inc. to pay taxes on IP profit from America このようなマーケットアプローチのアイデアが出てくると、データやブランドだけでなく、そのうち特許も議論の対象になってくるかもしれません。 特許実務では、輸出管理規則に従って最初に出願すべき国を決定するために、その発明の譲受人（所有者）の本国と居住地が検討されます。その情報は、納税国や納税額の決定するためにも使用されることがあります。

In response to the global trends, the Japanese government announced a policy to strengthen the personal data protection on April 25 2019. It will enhance the right for individuals to demand companies to stop using their personal information. Under the current law, individuals can demand it, only if such data has been fraudulently acquired or used for purposes other than the original intent. On the other hand, the government has considered the creation of the so-called data bank, as introduced before. The data bank distributes personal data with the consent of the individuals. Then, it provides them with the compensation. I hear that, in the demonstration experiment, most users have chosen to […]

The previous article covered a failure of legislation for piracy website blocking due to legal considerations of constitutionally guaranteed secrecy of communication. Now the secrecy of communication is likely to apply to foreign platform providers, especially to big tech companies called GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple), according to a draft document distributed in an advisory committee meeting which was held on January 21 2019. The scope of the secrecy of communication covers not only the communication content but also the date and time of the communication, the identification of communication parties, and everything which can be used to infer the semantic contents of the communication. Therefore, it may make an impact […]

How much would you sell your personal data? Japan has been considering building a data market to assist companies create new services, as previously reported. The first application in such a data market would be the personal data exchange. Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking Corporation (MUTB), the second largest in trust business in Japan, announced that it starts a demonstration experiment for a new data management service from this August. Reportedly, it will launch this new service in 2019. The feature of this service is that individuals will be able to specify the personal data to be provided and a company which is permitted to use the data, while participant companies […]