Prosecutors have established a policy for acknowledging copyright claims on obscene videos that are prohibited for circulation in South Korea, and for punishing Internet users who repeatedly post videos on the Internet for purposes of profit.

Following a recent case in which some 50 producers of obscene videos in the U.S. and Japan filed a breach of copyright lawsuit against Korean Internet users, the Criminal Department of the Supreme Public Prosecutor‘s Office, headed by So Byeong-cheol, have created and distributed guidelines for handling such cases to local prosecutors’ offices. Under these guidelines, prosecutors are required to apply charges of violation of the Copyright Act in cases where users receive money after posting three or more videos on file sharing sites and in cases where the same offense has been committed twice or more in the past. Prosecutors also plan to charge users with the distribution of obscene materials.

“Since there has been some confusion on the front lines over whether we need to protect copyrights on obscene materials, we based our standards on opinions collected from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Education and the police,” said Park Gyun-taek, head of the first criminal division at the Supreme Public Prosecutor’s Office. “With the Copyright Act amendment in effect, we are obligated to protect a work even if its artistic merits are not recognized,” Park explained.

Park also said that although the circulation of obscene videos by U.S. and Japanese companies is forbidden under the present law, they are recognized as products and subject to protection by South Korean law according to the principles of national treatment under the Berne Convention, which serves as the cornerstone for international treaties on intellectual property rights.

Formerly, a U.S. company identified by the initial “S,” which holds South Korean copyrights for certain U.S. and Japanese video production companies, identified the IDs of 10,000 South Korean users who had distributed obscene videos through the Internet and filed complaints against them at ten different police stations. At the time it had been suggested that standards were needed, since opinions differed among investigative bodies over whether to recognize copyrights on illegal obscene materials.

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