On April 1st 2009, South Korea took a step into the unknown by passing legislation to begin such a regime. By July 2009, warnings were being delivered to users via their ISPs and now, thanks to work by Heesob Nam, the results of the first 6 months of the scheme are available, as shown in the table below:

Interestingly, ‘Suspension of User Account’ – the 3rd strike – hasn’t been used at all in any case. So, while on one side people will argue that a 3 strikes regime was never necessary, others in the music industry will no doubt frame it differently – that the threat was necessary to force compliance and has been proven to be 100% effective. Whether that trend continued for the rest of 2010 remains to be seen.

However, a unique aspect of the South Korean implementation of 3 strikes is that it applies to websites too. If found to be continually hosting infringing content, either as reported by copyright holders or at the discretion of the government, sites run the risk of being shut down by the authorities.

It is of great interest, then, that while the above figures show zero disconnections for the the first 7 months of the scheme, the same will not be true when March 2011′s figures are reported.

The South Korean authorities have just announced they have conducted a major crackdown on some of the country’s top cyberlocker/file-hosting services.

According to the Ministry of Culture, 19 “die-hard” sites were targeted in the operation which was carried out by dozens of investigators over the past several days.

Together the sites are reported to have served between 2 million and 4 million users, and in common with pending cases in the United States, prosecutors in South Korea claim that the sites encouraged those users to upload infringing material.

So far around 1000 TB of data has been seized and the prosecutors say work is now underway to identify the heaviest uploaders. Since South Korea’s 3 strikes law allows action to be taken against those who continually upload infringing content even to file-hosting sites, Internet suspensions could be on the way.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

At the end of July 2009, new anti-piracy legislation took effect in South Korea which aggressively targeted illicit file-sharers and other online copyright infringers. The laws, created by the country’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, gave the authorities the power to disconnect pirates for up to 6 months.

According to the annual report of state-run piracy monitor the Korea Copyright Commission, it detected 35,345 cases of copyright infringement from so-called ‘cyberlocker’ services and P2P sites in 2009, nearly three times as many as the 2008 total of almost 12,000. Video and music infringements accounted for around 32% of all violations. Cases against individual file-sharers are still to be revealed.

This tough legislation was welcomed by the IFPI, who in their Digital Music Report 2010 labeled the action as the correct response to a “crisis”. The music group noted that digital sales had jumped 53% in the first 9 months of 2009, although sales of the same had already risen by 18% in the first 6 months of the year – pre-legislation – largely due to the fresh availability of legal alternatives.

However, according to the results of a survey carried out by Hong Kong-based Music Matters of 8,500 people in 13 countries, South Koreans still committed the second greatest number of online music infringements in 2009.

Released at the 2010 MIDEM event, the results revealed that the top spot was taken by the Chinese, with around 68% of users admitting they had downloaded music without paying for it. The South Koreans took second position with 60% with the Spanish coming in third with 46%.

The South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has cast doubt on the report though. Apparently the question asked by Music Matters to those surveyed was a rather ambiguous “Have you downloaded music from the internet without payment?”

It’s impossible to say if the respondents felt that, for example, an ad-supported service like Spotify or other legitimately free services should be taken into account when giving a response.

In the meantime, the South Korean government has asked news outlets not to publish the results of the survey until they’ve had a chance to look into its validity. Those calls have been widely ignored.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The studios also filed suit against 80 websites accused of aiding and abetting the distribution of the illegally uploaded movies.

A National Police Agency spokesman said that the lawsuit was filed at 10 police stations in the South Korean capital, Seoul, and in the Gyeonggi province. The studios asked the police to investigate the infringements, which carry a potential jail sentence.

However, from the 10,000 complaints issued, prosecutors charged just 10 people with copyright infringement. In response, the disappointed studios say they will fight back. Next week they promise to re-file their lawsuit, but this time will increase the number of individuals accused to 65,000.

Kim Han-Seo, a lawyer representing the movie producers, said that the prosecutors were not tough enough so they had decided to up the ante.

“Now, we’ve drawn up a new list of some 65,000 users who fit this guideline,” he said. “We’ll see whether the prosecutors will press charges against them all.”

As we reported earlier on our sister site FreakBits, at the end of August distributors of a hit Korean disaster movie called in the police after it was leaked to the Internet and was downloaded 100,000 times. Kim Han-Seo said that the Korean authorities had responded quickly to that local problem, but accused them of different standards when it comes to protecting foreign content, such as the material produced by his porn movie employers.

“We believe that [the prosecution] should not be discriminatory in applying copyright laws. Illegal copying and distribution run rampant in Korea because it is one of the world’s most wired countries. We decided to take legal action to minimize our past business losses and to protect anticipated future profits,” he said.

The threat now is that if the local Korean authorities fails to act in a way that pleases the porn producers, they will take their case directly to the US government instead.

The initial lawsuit indicated that the studios had also harvested the IP addresses of around 100,000 individuals who downloaded the adult movies but to date, there is no indication that they will become a target.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

There is no such doubt in South Korea. Today, tough new anti-piracy legislation takes effect which targets illicit file-sharers in a particularly aggressive way. The scheme, hatched by the country’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, gives authorities the power to disconnect pirates for up to 6 months.

However, 3 Strikes for file-sharers is just a small part of the issue.

Although the government insists the rules are targeted at large scale infringers, thanks to a lack of clear boundaries in the legislation – which simply refers to “copyrighted content” – South Korea has extended the 3 Strikes concept to pretty much everyone adding content to the Internet.

According to SKC, the operator of social networking site Cyworld and web portal Nate, any South Korean running a blog or a social networking page will have to be very careful indeed.

In recent days the company has been alerting its users to the new law, notifying them that not only is the sharing of copyright songs, movies and TV shows illegal, but also the use of any copyrighted images or videos. Any of these could earn the infringer a strike.

Any ‘YouTube’-style homemade videos that contain copyrighted music in the background are also banned and will also get you a strike.

And song lyrics. And excerpts from books.

We shall know shortly if the copyright industries behave responsibly with their new found power or if they choose to use it as a weapon of mass disconnection. Either way, South Korea’s enviable broadband position is hardly likely to benefit from the legislation.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.