I fucked with the title a bit. What i linked to was actually a mastodon post linking to an actual thing. but in my defense, i found it because cory doctorow boosted it, so, in a way, i am providing the original source here.
please argue. please do not remove.
deleted by creator
https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-data-fair-game-and-will-not-enforce-copyright/
Ignore the petapixel article. Even the headline is false.
Fair Use in the US comes directly from the constitution. I don’t think other countries have anything quite like it. Also, in the English Law system much of the law is made by judges (case law). Japan’s system is a Civil Law system which seeks to keep law-making with the actual legislative bodies. Law-makers in these countries have to be much more on the ball.
About 15 years ago, law-makers in these countries began explicitly allowing AI training (actually, data-mining in general). In Japan this first happened in 2009 and was expanded in 2018.
It is an advantage for these countries that the matter is already cleared up by their functioning legislatures, but if there is something they didn’t think of (or lobbyists messed things up) then tough luck. The US still has its constitutional protections which means that any necessary corrections can still be made at “runtime”. I think the internet as we know it might not have been possible in any other country.