Technology: Japan

(asked on 9th March 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment he has made of the effect of the source code, software and algorithm provisions of the UK-Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement on the Government’s right to regulate new technologies.


Answered by
Matt Warman Portrait
Matt Warman
This question was answered on 17th March 2021

The UK-Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership includes a provision that ensures UK businesses will not be forced to share their software’s source code, or algorithms expressed in that source code, as a condition of entering the Japanese market. This provides protection for UK company trade secrets and allows companies to retain any competitive advantage that their source code provides.

The agreement does not prohibit all regulatory intervention in respect of new technologies and is designed with future-proofing in mind. The permissible interventions include setting standards, supplier selection, reviewing coding procedures, inspecting underlying data-sets, and prose explanations as to how an algorithm reached a decision.

In designing the exceptions to the source code provision, the UK and Japan have taken a technology and regulator neutral approach. We are convinced that this approach is best to ensure the provision and the exceptions meet both the current and future needs of UK regulators.

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