Court rules in favor of netizen who posted video of Kim Yu-na

Posted on : 2012-11-23 13:15 KST Modified on : 2019-10-19 20:29 KST
After being sued by government minister, web user fights back against internet establishment

By Kim Seon-sik, staff reporter

When 32-year-old Cha Gyeong-yun posted the so-called “Evasive Yu-na” video and pictures, which seemed to show skater Kim Yu-na avoiding contact with Yoo In-chon, former Minister of Culture Sports and Tourism, he was sued by the Minister. Now Cha has won in a damage claim suit he brought against Naver (NHN), the portal site that had handed over his personal information to the police during the suit. The appellate judgment handed down on Nov. 18 (Civil Division 24 of the Seoul High Court, with Judge Kim Sang-jun presiding) overturned the lower court‘s decision and found in favor of Cha, two years and three months after the suit was filed in July 2010.

Two months after filing the suit, Cha went to Beijing to study Chinese. He returned in July of this year. He is currently working as a labor activist at the regular labor union office of the Gyeonggi branch of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU).

When Cha was sued in March 2010, he had just finished three years and four months of service as an ROTC officer and was preparing to start looking for a job.

“I was just another ordinary guy in the ‘880,000 won generation’ of low-paid workers, worried about getting a job and stressed out about having to study English to get my resume up to speed,” Cha recalled. In fact, it was on the humor page of his English institute’s website that he posted the ‘Evasive Yu-na’ video.

“If you want to get hired by a major company, you have to agree to provide your personal information three or four times when submitting your application,” said Cha. “After I was sued and my name was in the news, I was really crushed. I thought that no one would ever hire me.”

The moment that he was contacted by the police was really awkward. All he had done was post a single video that he thought was funny. He couldn’t believe that a government minister was actually bringing legal action against him, and it seemed that the portal was out to get him as well.

“These internet portals and online businesses make money on sharing data. Don’t think for a moment that they are taking good care of your private information- it’s just the opposite,” warned Cha. “They let the investigators take anything they wanted. It’s like they‘re using the freedom of the internet as a pretext to expose helpless internet users to a surveillance network.”

It wasn’t easy for an ordinary netizen such as Cha to take on the giant internet portal. He wasn’t alone, though: two civic groups, People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy and MINBYUN-Lawyers for a Democratic Society, helped him bring the case to court.

“Despite the fact that this was my case, I handed it over to the advocacy groups and made my way to China,” Cha said. “It occurs to me that during my life I have racked up some major debts to pro-democracy, progressive political groups, and the labor movement.”

While watching reports in China this past March about voting fraud in the United Progressive Party’s primary, Cha came to an abrupt realization. “While I was witnessing the crisis in progressive politics, I felt a number of different things. I felt sorry for having handed over the Naver lawsuit to other people, and I also felt anxious that the movement that had carried forward democracy all this time and the democratic cause itself was being threatened. At the same time, I made up my mind that I should do something to support the powerless.”

On Nov. 5, Cha began working in his current job with the KCTU. One of his recent tasks has been to confirm whether portal sites and mobile carriers have been surrendering their clients’ personal information to investigators. Another is to find people to take part in class-action lawsuits against such organizations. (peoplepower21.org/PublicLaw/970067)

“I just don’t want to see anybody else subjected as I was to such outrageous surveillance, legal intimidation, and oppression simply for posting something that makes the government uncomfortable,” said Cha.

“Netizens have to join forces. Your rights as an individual can be violated in the blink of an eye.”

 

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