Professor Masayuki Hatta
Masayuki Hatta, MEcon is Professor of Economics and Management at Surugadai University in Hanno, Saitama, Japan, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM), the information society research institute of the International University of Japan.
Trained as an economist and organizational theorist at the University of Tokyo, he studies how institutions and technical systems reshape one another, and what forms of governance keep powerful technologies accountable to the public rather than to a few private interests. He has been an official Debian and GNU Project developer since 2000, and writes regularly for general audiences on privacy, platforms, intellectual property, and the relationship between technology and democracy.
Masayuki’s research centers on three connected questions — the governance and openness of artificial intelligence, the geopolitics of encryption, and the sustainability of open source. He designed and teaches the Surugadai curriculum on management information, technology governance, and internet culture, translating frontier debates in AI, cryptography, and open source into courses for future managers and citizens.
In 2026, he secured competitive KAKENHI funding from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for Constructing a Theory of Structural Openness: An Interdisciplinary Redefinition of the Concept of “Open” in the Age of AI, a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research running through 2028.
In August 2025, Masayuki presented Several Issues Regarding Data Governance in AGI at the 18th Annual AGI Conference at Reykjavik University, published in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science. The paper identifies seven governance challenges specific to systems capable of recursive self-improvement or self-replication, from autonomous data collection that circumvents consent mechanisms to enforcement of data protection law against self-replicating systems distributed across jurisdictions.
His participation was supported by a grant from the KDDI Foundation, awarded at the foundation’s sixteenth ceremony in January 2026. His follow-up paper, Reproducibility is the New Copyleft: Defining AGI-oriented Reproducible Builds, argues that a functional analog of copyleft for artificial general intelligence must rest not on share-alike clauses over source code but on reproducible builds — a practice guaranteeing bit-exact reconstructability from declared inputs — and sets out seven requirements for achieving it.
Since 2023, Masayuki has served as a Technical and Cybersecurity Expert at the Global Encryption Coalition, a group of over 400 organizations, companies, and cybersecurity experts that defends encryption where it is under threat. He is among the signatories of coalition statements including a joint letter to the European Commission on the European Internal Security Strategy and a call on the Turkish government not to undermine end-to-end encryption.
His paper The Geopolitics of Cryptography: End-to-End Encryption at the Intersection of Technology, Security, and Sovereignty examines encryption regulation across twenty jurisdictions and develops an original five-part typology, arguing that regulatory divergence is shaped less by technical constraints than by how digital sovereignty is conceptualized.
He presented on the effects of weakening encryption policies and on consumer data rights at the Internet Governance Forum 2023, and on face recognition technology and state surveillance in East Asia at RightsCon 2020. Between 2018 and 2024, he led a KAKENHI project on anonymizing technology and whistleblowing platforms.
Masayuki coined the term “Nebraska problem” to describe the fragility of critical digital infrastructure maintained by tiny, often invisible communities of volunteers. Read The Nebraska problem in open source software development, Deep web, dark web, dark net: A taxonomy of “hidden” Internet, The Right to Repair, the Right to Tinker, and the Right to Innovate, The Role of Mailing Lists for Policy Discussions in Open Source Development, Cowboys and the Eternal September: Transfiguration of hacker aesthetics, and Growing an open source community.
As a practitioner, Masayuki has maintained TeX, PostScript, and text-processing packages relied on across the global Debian ecosystem for over two decades, sustaining their quality and security through volunteer stewardship.
His Debian maintainer record spans the a2ps PostScript converter, the Japanese TeX toolchain, Adobe CMap resources, and the I2P anonymity package. He served on Committee D of the official discussion committees for the revision of the GNU General Public License version 3, helping shape one of the world’s most widely used software licenses through its landmark 2007 revision, and produced the Japanese translations of the GNU General Public License and the GNU Lesser General Public License.
Between 2003 and 2004, he was Chief Translation Coordinator for the GNU Project, leading localization of www.gnu.org and expanding the project’s reach to non-English-speaking users.
Watch Is there a role for Debian in the post-open source era?, his session at DebConf24 in Busan.
Masayuki has been a Board Member of Movements for the Internet Active Users (MIAU) since 2007, helping form and lobby policy on technological and social issues in Japan, and has served as a director of the association since 2020.
He is a founding member of Open Knowledge Japan. He sat on the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications’ Conference toward AI Network Society between 2017 and 2019, on a Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry committee on evaluation criteria for blockchain-based systems between 2016 and 2017, and on the legal task group of the Open Software Center at the Information-technology Promotion Agency between 2005 and 2006.
Masayuki joined Surugadai University in 2011 as Assistant Professor of Economics, was appointed Associate Professor of Economics and Management in 2017, and has held a full professorship since 2024. Earlier, he was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Intellectual Property between 2010 and 2011, conducting research on FLOSS licensing and software patents, and a Research Associate at the Manufacturing Management Research Center of the University of Tokyo between 2008 and 2010.
He has been an Adviser to OSDN since 2003, acting as editor-in-chief of SourceForge.jp Magazine, formerly japan.linux.com, and as an editor of Slashdot Japan. Between 2008 and 2010, he also wrote a bi-weekly jazz column for the The Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s largest national newspapers, introducing newly unearthed golden-age live recordings to a general readership.
Masayuki earned his Bachelor’s Degree and Master’s Degree in Economics from the University of Tokyo, where he was a member of the Jazz Society and where his master’s thesis examined the significance of the Open Source Definition in open source software development. He continued as a PhD candidate in the university’s Graduate School of Economics between 2005 and 2010, researching FLOSS development and organizational evolution using multi-agent simulation.
In 2002, he received the OSDL Award from the Japan Linux Association. He is a member of the International Association for Cryptologic Research and of the Japanese scholarly societies for organizational science, socio-information studies, and information and communication.
Masayuki is based in Tokyo and works in Japanese and English. Read his Contributions in Newsweek Japan and his Contributions on Yahoo! News Expert.
Visit his homepage, LinkedIn profile, about.me page, faculty page, Wikipedia page, Google Scholar page, ResearchGate profile, researchmap profile, Academia profile, and ORCiD. Follow him on Facebook, GitHub, Mastodon, Bluesky, Substack, Medium, and X.