Japanese Supreme Court’s First Ruling on the Copyrightability of Works of Applied Art (Judgment issu

Japanese Supreme Court’s First Ruling on the Copyrightability of Works of Applied Art (Judgment issued on April 24, 2026)

1. Introduction

On April 24, 2026, the Supreme Court of Japan (the “Supreme Court”) rendered a judgment (the “Judgment”) addressing the widely debated issue of whether works of applied art can be protected under Japanese copyright law and the criteria therefor.

Courts in Japan had expressed divergent views on this issue, and this issue had been a long-standing topic of debate among scholars and practitioners. Against this backdrop, the Supreme Court explicitly addressed in the Judgment, for the first time, the specific criteria for determining whether shape, design or color or their combination of “products intended to be mass-produced and put to practical use in everyday life” qualifies as a copyrighted work^[1].

Given this, in this newsletter, we briefly summarize the discussions regarding the copyrightability of works of applied art prior to the Judgment (section 2), introduce an overview of the facts of the case (i.e., Peter Opsvik AS et al. v. Noz Corporation; the “Case”) as well as the rulings of the Intellectual Property High Court (the “IPHC”) and the Supreme Court (sections 3–5), and provide our comments on the potential impact of the Judgment on future intellectual property law practice in Japan (section 6).

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Authors: Kenji Tosaki (Partner), Takahiro Hatori (Partner), Nozomi Kato

Endnote

^[1]To be precise, the Supreme Court had once rendered its decision in a case where the parties disputed over this issue before the Judgment: Takeshi Nii v. Nissen Co., Ltd., Supreme Court Judgment of March 28, 1991. In that case, the copyrightability of NychairX, the chair designed by the plaintiff and recognized for having received numerous design awards, was disputed and ultimately denied by the lower court. While the Supreme Court of this NychairX judgment affirmed the decision of the lower court, it provided no substantive commentary, and made no specific decision as to whether a work of applied art can be evaluated as a copyrighted work.