Intellectual Property Rights in Japan and the Protection of Computer Software

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of Japan&s;s industrial property rights regime and its possible relationship to Japan&s;s past industrial development, primarily with a view to pointing out the kinds of questions one would like to investigate in detail in drawing lessons from Japan&s;s past. It examines a discussion of the Japanese copyright regime, in particular the application of that regime to computer programs, in an effort to evaluate where Japan is now and to guess where it may be going in the protection of the newly developing information-based products. Statutory and judicial protection of trade secrets and against unfair competition has been historically, and remains, quite weak in Japan in comparison with that afforded in the United States. Japan&s;s traditional willingness to protect copyright rights can be expected to have a spillover effect on protection in other areas of intellectual property law, including the radical decision to apply copyright law to technology in the form of computer programs.