By I posted before on the legal spat between US and Korean porn producers and now it appears this spat is growing:
Illegal downloads are a problem not even Apple, the maker of iPods, or major Hollywood record labels can solve. Now this fight to protect copyright is finding a new ally in a dubious sector: pornography.
U.S. and Japanese porn makers are suing 65,000 people here who they claim have downloaded their products without permission.
This is the second round of the battle following their attempt to take culprits to court last July.
Then, a group of 50 porn producers in the two countries filed a lawsuit against 10,000 Koreans for posting the producers’ adult films on local file-sharing Web sites.
They also alleged that Koreans charged subscribers to download them.
However, the prosecution decided to investigate only those who uploaded the films more than three times, with only 10 of them being held legally responsible.
Dissatisfied with the result, they plan to file a lawsuit next week against 65,000 Korean Internet users.
This time, the porn makers are enlisting the help of Korean legal experts. A law firm was hired and is working on their behalf.
The firm has cited the double standards employed by Korea in handling piracy.
“Copyright laws should be applied equally whether it is local or foreign material,” said an official at the law firm. [Korea Times]
Heck if Louis Vuitton can win a counterfeiting case in Korea then these porn producers should have a pretty decent chance of winning their case as well.
9:03 pm on September 16th, 2009 1
I'd love to hear how they will argue that this has damaged the market for their products in Korea since porn is illegal here.
12:46 am on September 17th, 2009 2
It will also be interesting to see how far Korea had come along in it's efforts to curtail anonymity for there portal users. Then, whether these records can be obtained in supeonas for foreign suits against Koreans.
When Koreans learn that their mandatory user verification laws may not only leave them exposed to domestic claims but international ones, they may start to appreciate why Google pulled out of their rules and have second thoughts about them.
10:53 pm on September 17th, 2009 3
The KT article is not very good reporting because it's not clear whether the pornographers are pressing a civil or a criminal case.
If the former, my bet is that the suit will be dismissed by the court on the ground that the state is not going to provide a forum for the perpetrator of illegal activity to obtain a remedy for someone else's interference with that activity. There is plenty of precedent for this sort of refusal of the courts to act in the US, including in a case before the federal district curt in Washington over the claim by one operator of a sex tourism portal site for trademark infringement against another that used a similar name.
If the pornographers' lawyers really are pressing a copyright case, then the pornographers have chosen incompetent lawyers and are wasting their money.
On the other hand, if they are pushing for a criminal prosecution, they theoretically OUGHT to be able to get the Court to act, since the Korean state does have an interest in enforcing its own laws for the benefit of its own citizens; of course whether a Koren court will do so – or do so meaningfully — against the interests of some its own citizens at the behest of a foreign complainant remains to be seen. In any event, this would be the smart(er) play, since I suppose their principal objective is to put an end to the priacy reselling (and not try to collect compensatory damages, and criminal sanctions would get them what they really want.