Korea Kicking People Offline With One Strike

An anonymous reader writes "While there's lots of talk of 'three strikes' laws in places like France, it may be worth looking over at South Korea, which put in place a strict new copyright law, required by a 'free trade' agreement with the US (which was the basis for ACTA). It went into effect in the middle of 2009, and now there's some data about how the program is going. What's most troubling is that the Copyright Commission appears to be using its powers to 'recommend' ISPs suspend user accounts based on just one strike, with no notice and no warning. The system lets the Commission make recommendations, but in well over 99% of the cases, the ISPs follow the recommendations, and they've never refused to suspend a user's account."

Comments

A very good question indeed!

[erroneus]

Not only did I read the article, I read the comments as well. The first one I read was a rather interesting quesiton: "Did sales of copyrighted materials go up as a result?" After all, in theory, with "reduced piracy" there should be an increase in sales.

But we all know that's not why they are doing this. There are no real losses. Fact is, like all other IP, there is an element of enforce it or forget it. While copyright doesn't actually "go away" when it is not enforced as in the case of trade marks, the more freely the infringement occurs, the less likely people are to respect it.

It would be nice if there were some middle ground, some safe area for file sharers. But there's not just yet. I am a file sharer of content that I don't fear sharing. But where U.S. content of any sort is concerned, I simply don't share. I might download and then disconnect on occasion, but rarely even that. Got too much to lose.

Re:A very good question indeed!

[mellon]

The thing that I found interesting about TFA was that a total of 31 people in all of Korea were disconnected over the course of a year. Hardly headline news..

Re:So...what happens in the other 1%?

[WrongSizeGlass]

Though they acted over 99% of the time, just over half of the actions were warnings. Check out the table from the article. It even shows that 40 recommendations were not complied with (but only from one ISP).

Re:Online gaming

[icebraining]

I've never heard anyone here even go to court, unless they were part of a full network producing and selling content, and even that is not common.

For actually perpetrating acts of pedophilia with real children, sure, we have plenty. In fact we had a huge scandal a few years ago, and the trial has ended just now (our justice system is sloooooow). But for downloading? Never heard of it.

Re:How widespread is piracy in SK?

[MichaelSmith]

I can't answer your question but I will say that the Koreans do things differently. Once I needed to download a .deb to install uucp on my laptop. I got a line and an IP address but all I got was a text file telling me I wasn't allowed to access that file. So I gave the URL and a USB key to a guy with a windows box. Still he got the same message. He removed the USB key and the file downloaded okay to local storage. Then he mounted the usb key and passed the .deb to me.

You see everybody runs IE. The web proxies install a component (ActiveX I suppose) which checks for mounted devices which could be used for piracy or to upload malware. Its stupid and easy to work around but people just seem at accept it as the way things work.