South Korea calls for self-censoring
p2pnet news view | P2P | Politics:- 
Have South Korean president Lee Myung-bak and French president Nicolas Sarkozy signed a secret accord?
They both seem hell bent on forcing entertainment industry initiated legislation through their respective governments — whether the people who elected them like it or not.
In April, South Korea joined countries whose leaders believe it`s part of their duty to become taxpayer-funded copyright enforcers on behalf of the hugely wealthy corporate movie and music industries, said p2pnet.
And so far, it looks as though the Lee has the edge.
A debate over the excessiveness of the South Korean version of the corporate Three Strikes and You’re Gone law was, “triggered earlier this month when Naver (www.naver.com), the country’s most popular Web site, decided to delete a video clip of a five-year-old girl singing and dancing to a Son Dam-bi song, which had been posted by a users of its blog services,” says the Korea Times.
The South Korea anti-file sharing law was passed by Lee`s government, ‘despite protests from Internet companies and civil liberties advocates that it could threaten the freedom of expression on the Internet,’ said an earlier Korea Times story.
Lawmakers also okayed a bill calling for the, strengthening of the real-name verification on Web sites, it said, going on according to the “bulked-up copyright law,” the government could shut down an online message board for up to six months once the site is, “warned for a third time to delete pirated content and prevent its movement”.
“Surfers who, ‘repeatedly upload copyrighted content without permission could lose their Internet accounts’,” it stated.
Now, “Ministry officials emphasize that the provisions aren’t intended to target the average blogger, but the ‘heavy uploaders’ who move a large volume of illegal files on peer-to-peer services and online storage sites and gain commercially from the actions,” says the Korea Times, going on:
“However, most industry watchers believe that the impact of the strengthened law will immediately be felt by regular Internet users each time they press copy and paste, and eventually, might compromise the vibrancy of the country’s Internet culture.
“Critics argue that the loose definition of ‘copyrighted content,’ which could be anything from films and music to news stories and blog postings, makes the new law over-the-top.”
It says SK Communications, operator of Cyworld and Web portal Nate, has been alerting users about the changes since last week.
“The company is telling its users that the use of copyrighted images and videos on blogs or Web communities will be strictly prohibited, and that also goes for movie lines, song lyrics and book excerpts,” says the story, adding:
“SK Communications also warns that those goofy parodies of movie posters or video clips of school girls singing and dancing to the latest Wonder Girls tune won’t be allowed when the new law kicks in. And forget about posting restaurant reviews or traveling journals to blogs unless you wrote them yourself, based on the list of possible violations provided by the company.”
SK is also suggesting users engage in self-censoring, checking their own Web postings and erasing, “any content that used copyrighted materials without authorization”.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
p2pnet – New South Korea `3 strikes` copyright law, April 6, 2009
Korea Times – New Online Copyright Law Baffles Users, July 21, 2009
Korea Times – `Upload a Song, Lose Your Internet Connection`, April 5, 2009
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July 24th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
……. North Korea and SOUTH KOREA’s government should be seen as one whole country again.
July 25th, 2009 at 2:27 am
i don’ t expect to see a lot of enforcement of this stuff..not in Korea. and if there is you can bet that people will find a way around it so fast (they probably already have!)
it’s called a PC-bang! a cafe, a library, a university, a cheap motel, etc…there is no shortage of anonymous access points, and i’m on one now and just filled up a 160GB hard drive with many of my favorite albums and movies! yup, sure did.
anyways, expect to see a robust anonymous P2P system arise in the very near future…it’s coming, if it’s not here now. it’s possible now, but too slow. but i’ll bet you anything that by the end of next year uTorrent or something will work in an anonymous, hidden, encrypted mode….and tens of millions of people will use it.
at that point all these laws will be moot. and by then, people will be running it on their Linux (probably Android) cell phones, netbooks, PDAs, and other devices too…it’s all converging, and every device is a potential web server.