Legal Challenges to AI･Big Data Utilization

The development of the IoT environment that can collect scattered data, and AI technology that can accumulate and process infinitely increasing data, has emerged the big data era. As the world enters a full-fledged data economy, major countries are developing national strategies and actively overhauling legal systems to preempt AI technology and big data. Representatively, Japan has already revised the Copyright Act (2016, 2018), the Personal Information Protection Act (2017), and in 2018 the “Contract Guidelines on the Use of AI Data” was also enacted, laying the legal basis for the development and use of the big data industry. This paper mainly introduces Japanese guidelines, categorizes three types of data transaction contracts (provided, created, and platform) that are not covered in the existing research, and examines concepts and contract issues by type. In addition, this study examined whether these three types are appropriate for the data trading environment in Korea. It also analyzes the problems of copyright law and personal information protection law, which are obstacles in data utilization, compared with the cases of Japan and the United States, and suggests ways to improve them. This article suggests the necessity of legal basis for facilitating data transactions such as the data exchange platform and the sector-specific data trading platform. In addition, this article examines how to legally protect AI created works based on the increasing number of unstructured data, and suggests new legislative measures to protect AI creations as a solution. In other words, this paper discussed the need for protection of AI creations, protection requirements, ‘registration’ and ‘labelling system’ as a means of distinguishing human creation, remedies for infringement, and rights attainment. It also proposed the establishment of a new legislation (sui generis) for the protection of AI creations, and the creation of ‘a new concept of right’ rather than ‘copyrights’.