The Japanese Patent Office has announced plans to issue patents for programs on memory devices as long as the programs themselves comply with the general requirements for patentability. It will be recalled that the general requirement for patentability in Japan is that an invention be "the creation of a technological idea that exploits principles of nature". It seems, however, that the Patent Office intends to construe this broadly and indicated only that music, cultural and entertainment software will not qualify for patent protection. An example of what might qualify was given as a memory device that installs a program which functions to display on a screen an image of a printed document.

Thus Japan will join the United States as being one of the few places in the world wherein memory devices bearing a computer program are not regarded as being almost automatically unpatentable by nature of the form of what is being claimed.