Three Strikes Copyright Law Takes Effect
09 November 2012
South Korea’s new anti-piracy “three strikes” law went into effect in July, but it was not clear immediately if any file sharers have lost their internet access, as the law requires.
The law, passed earlier this year as an amendment to the country’ copyright law, allows authorities to disconnect internet access for up to six months for people accused of copyright infringement, even if copyright holders did not complain about the infringement.
It also gives the government authority to order the internet service provider to delete or stop transmission of pirated copies and to order telecommunication service providers to block connections to their networks from ISPs who do not cooperate with authorities.
An employee of the one of the country’s largest ISPs told the Korea Times that it is “virtually impossible for Web portals to totally filter illegal content” from the millions of daily postings. “And I am talking about companies that spend massive amounts of money to monitor copyright violations and hire hundreds of monitoring personnel,'” the employee said. “I mean, how much does the government expect us to spend in developing and operating a simple Web service? No matter how hard we try, the culture minister will easily find his three strikes and could order us to shutdown a site at anytime, regardless of whether the copyright holder has a problem with us or not.”
Three-strikes laws have been proposed in the UK, France and New Zealand, though none of those countries have actually adopted the policy. Following a report in the Straits Times newspaper, rumours circulated in Singapore in late August that authorities there were considering a three-strikes law similar to that in South Korea, though the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore later said it had no immediate plans to propose such a law.
