Patent Strategy for Medical AI Web Services — Rights and Enforcement in the Age of Distributed Deployment

Part 3: Does a Patent Really 'Reach' a Medical AI Service? The Architecture That Decides [Paid]

September 11, 2026 · Shishido & Associates

In 2025, Japan's Supreme Court signaled that 'even if the server is abroad, a patent can reach it when the use is substantively domestic.' But does that ruler fit the next generation of services? The Dwango v. FC2 case concerned a fairly simple feature: streaming video comments. A serious medical-AI web service is a different animal—real-time inference, persistent state, giant models, and multi-stage GPU pipelines spread across regions. This piece compares the two at the level of system architecture, mapping where the Court's 'totality-of-circumstances' test bites hardest, and where a service might slip out of reach.

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