On 9th April 2025, CIPPM will host a stakeholder roundtable on ‘deepfake and the law’.

The event follows on from the stakeholder roundtable which was hosted at Waseda University Tokyo on 16 December 2024 and forms part of the project funded by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation to carry out research into deepfake technology and the law.

The project, carried out in collaboration with Dr Rossana Ducato (University of Aberdeen) and Professor Tatsuhiro Ueno (Waseda University, Tokyo) explores the impact of deepfake technology on intellectual property, data protection, privacy and fraud laws and does so from the perspective of UK and Japan.

Deepfake AI is used to create convincing images, audio, video hoaxes and is a portmanteau of ‘deep learning’ and ‘fake’. Although the technology is advancing rapidly, it remains heavily unexplored from a policy and legal perspective. There have been initiatives in UK and Japan to address the challenges raised by this technology, however there is still a long way to go. Specific regulation in the area is currently absent in both countries.

The main objective of this research is to explore deepfake technology and the legal implications for UK and Japan, with a particular focus on copyright, data protection, privacy and fraud law. The project will consider the law and technology relating to deepfakes, in collaboration with a range of stakeholders drawn from UK and Japan in an attempt to understand the issues more deeply and to identify the way forward.

The stakeholder roundtable, which coincides with CIPPM’s 25th anniversary celebrations, will bring together stakeholders from the technology, creative, policy, practice and academic sectors. Findings from the stakeholder roundtable will be published following the event.