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(1) In February 2009, Woo Jong-Hyun (surname Woo) recorded his 5-year old daughter casually singing part of the popular singer Sondambi’s major hit I am Crazy unaccompanied and imitating the singer’s gestures and posted the video clip on his blog opened at the country’s major portal Naver, operated by NHN. June of that year, the Korean Music Copyright Association (KOMCA) issued about 16,000 takedown notices to Naver, including the one on Woo’s video clip. Naver immediately took down the video clip and rejected Woo’s restoration notice and the video clip has been down ever since. (2) Woo filed suit against KOMCA and NHN for damages under Article 103(6) of the Copyright Act: (6) Any person who demands, without legitimate authority, the suspension or resumption of the reproduction or transmission of relevant works, etc...

(1) Article 44-2(1) and (2) provide that, when a person requests certain information to be deleted as it infringes upon the person’s rights, the service provider “shall” immediately delete, temporarily block up to 30 days (“temporary measure”), or take any other necessary measure on the information. Always unsure of whether the information is rights-infringing or not, the provision has incentivized the service provider into erring on the side of deleting, often by deleting lawful information. On top of that, Paragraph (4) states that “if a dispute resolution is anticipated or if the service provider is not sure of the rights-infringing nature of the information”, it “may” take a temporary measure instead of a permanent measure. According to a Constitutional Court in 2012 (2010Hun-ma88), the total effect of these...

English Version (1) The Court held that, an intermediary, even if it knew or had reason to know of the defamatory material for 52 days, should not be held responsible unless a comprehensive analysis of the following factors point to such responsibility: (i) the posting’s purpose, content, duration and method, (ii) the damages it has caused, (iii) the relationship between the speaker and the injury-claimant, (iv) the claimant’s attitude including whether rebuttal or takedown was requested, (v) the size and nature of the site posted, (vi) the degree of for-profit nature of the site, (vii) when the operator knew or could have known the posting’s content, and (viii) the technological and pecuniary difficulty in taking down, etc. Having said so, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court that imposed the liability for pre...

(English Version) (1) This case concerns obscene materials. The defendants were employees of an Internet portal in charge of the portal’s “entertainment channel.” There were obscene cartoons on the cartoon section of the entertainment channel. (2) The Supreme Court held the defendant liable for not deleting the cartoons and thus aiding the violation of Article 48-2 of the former Framework Act on Telecommunications (amended by Act No. 6360 on January 16, 2001) which punished distribution, sale, rental or exhibition of obscene materials on the Internet. The issue in this case was whether the defendants had a duty to delete the cartoons. The court affirmed that such duty existed and that the defendants aided the crime by nonfeasance.

(1) Article 2 subparagraph 1 defines “children or juveniles” as “persons under 19 years of age” and “child or juvenile pornography” as “depiction of children or juveniles, or persons or representations that can be perceived evidently as children or juveniles” doing sexual act. (2) Article 17 (Obligations of Online Service Providers) imposes obligations regarding child pornography on OSPs as follows: Any online service provider who fails to take measures prescribed by Presidential Decree to detect child or juvenile pornography in the information and communications network managed by himself/herself or who fails to immediately delete the detected pornography and take technical measures to prevent or block transmission thereof, shall be punished by imprisonment with prison labor for not more than three years or by a fine...