Press Release
Open Net Korea leads discussions on AI Digital Textbooks and Southeast Asian Democracy at the Summit for Democracy with Korean law students and regional activists
<Privacy and Surveillance Issues in AI Digital Textbook Policy>- Date & Time: March 19...
Press Briefing on the Violation of the Freedom of Expression in South Korea
Date & Time: Thursday, March 14, 2024, 2:30 PM Venue: Seoul Foreign Correspondents’...
The world’s most bizarre court decision: Louis Vuitton’s trademark lawsuit infringing upon consumers’ right to enjoy culture
Louis Vuitton has won its first round of trademark infringement lawsuits against small repair...
The Police Conducted a Search and Seizure on the KCSC after Employees of the KCSC Reported Suspicions of Misconduct by Chairman Ryu Hee-rim: The necessity to amend the Personal Information Protection Act, which is being misused as a means of suppressing public interest disclosures and media coverage
Yesterday (Jan. 15, 2024), police raided the offices of the Korea Communications Standards...
Fight for internet freedom in Vietnam before UN
Open Net made a joint submission with ARTICLE 19 and Legal Initiatives for Vietnam to the...
LITIGATION
EFF Supports Open Net’s legal challenge against mandatory upload filter
Electronic Frontier Foundation is filing the attached amicus brief in a constitutional challenge...
[Statement] The Industry Protection Act Task Force Expresses disappointment with the Court’s Decision to Dismiss the Constitutional Complaint on the Industry Protection Act: the Task Force will Try to Recover the Right to Know which is Insulted by the Industry Protection Act at Our Best
Seeking unconstitutional litigations for individuals and companies on unfair trial for 'tech...
Court Decision on ‘Bad Fathers’ Case Reveals the Excessiveness and Unconstitutionality of the Truth Defamation: Open Net Urges the National Assembly to Abolish Criminal Truth Defamation Law Immediately
On January 4, 2024, the Supreme Court, Division 2 (Chief Justice Chun Dae-yup, presiding),...
UC IRVINE INT’L JUSTICE CLINIC & KU INT’L HUMAN RTS CLINIC ON WOMEN ON WEB
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Expressing Regret over the Constitutional Court’s Decision to Remove the Right to Access Pseudonymous Information
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OPEN SEMINAR
[Press Release] Ryu Hee-rim, who accused an internal employees, is the subject of an investigation
Today, we stand in front of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, which conducted a search and...
IGF 2023 DAY 4 WORKSHOP ROOM 11 UNFAIR SHARE AND ZERO RATING WHO PAYS FOR THE INTERNET
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[Press Conference]Public Announcement for Font File Copyright Royalty Negotiation Guidelines
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UC IRVINE INT’L JUSTICE CLINIC & KU INT’L HUMAN RTS CLINIC ON WOMEN ON WEB
Before uploading the English version, please read the Korean version with translation tools.
Public Announcement for Font File Copyright Royalty Negotiation Guidelines
Before uploading the English version, please read the Korean version with translation tools.
COURT ACTIONS
[Statement] The Industry Protection Act Task Force Expresses disappointment with the Court’s Decision to Dismiss the Constitutional Complaint on the Industry Protection Act: the Task Force will Try to Recover the Right to Know which is Insulted by the Industry Protection Act at Our Best
Seeking unconstitutional litigations for individuals and companies on unfair trial for 'tech...
[Open Net and ARTICLE 19 to the Constitutional Court of Korea] Repeal Article 7 of the National Security Act
Open Net and ARTICLE 19 submitted a third-party intervention to the Constitutional Court of Korea...
Open Net Welcomes Court’s Ruling That Nonprofit Organizations’ Use of “Free Font” Is Fair Use of Works
Open Net Welcomes Court’s Ruling That a Nonprofit Organization’s Use of "Free Font" Is Fair Use A...
Open Net Successfully Defends Against Exploitative Font Copyright Lawsuit in Its Public Interest Litigation Case
You can read the Korean original here.
Open Net Expresses Disappointment Over Court Decision on ‘Bad Fathers’ Case and Urges the National Assembly to Abolish Criminal Truth Defamation Law
You can read the Korean original here.
education
Open Net Korea leads discussions on AI Digital Textbooks and Southeast Asian Democracy at the Summit for Democracy with Korean law students and regional activists
<Privacy and Surveillance Issues in AI Digital Textbook Policy>- Date & Time: March 19...
Press Briefing on the Violation of the Freedom of Expression in South Korea
Date & Time: Thursday, March 14, 2024, 2:30 PM Venue: Seoul Foreign Correspondents’...
The world’s most bizarre court decision: Louis Vuitton’s trademark lawsuit infringing upon consumers’ right to enjoy culture
Louis Vuitton has won its first round of trademark infringement lawsuits against small repair...
EFF Supports Open Net’s legal challenge against mandatory upload filter
Electronic Frontier Foundation is filing the attached amicus brief in a constitutional challenge...
[Press Release] Ryu Hee-rim, who accused an internal employees, is the subject of an investigation
Today, we stand in front of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, which conducted a search and...
POLICY RESEARCH
2023/11/9 Joint seminar: UC Irvine Int’l Justice Clinic & KU Int’l Human Rts Clinic on Women on Web
On November 9, 2023 (KST), UC Irvine Law School’s International Justice Clinic and Korea...
DRAPAC Series: South Korea’s Lessons for Threats to Southeast Asian internet freedom
In this episode of the DRAPAC Series, Kyung Sin ‘KS’ Park, a professor at the Korea University...
[Press Conference] In Condemnation of ‘Jeonju Gender Equity’ for Its Decision to Censor and Discriminate Based on Artists’ Conscience
*An English translation is currently unavailable for this publication. You can find the original...
Open Net Hosts National Assembly Seminar on the Blocking of Access to North Korean Media on the Internet
The Ministry of Unification recently announced plans to gradually open up access to North Korean...
Part 3 of Open Net’s Special Lecture Series on Media Literacy – How to Distinguish Between Good and Bad News (14:00 June 8, Online and Offline)
You can read the Korean original here.
CAMPAIGN
Stop Internet Censoring
We have seen many attempts to censor the Internet under the pretext of copyright protection. Notorious attempts are SOPA and PIPA of 2012, which triggered the largest online protest in history and was eventually withdrawn, and ACTA, a plurilateral trade deal killed by the European Parliament in 2012. Now, Korean government tries to enact a much stronger internet censoring rule. If it passes the legislative body, a copyright protection agency may cut off access to websites that the agency views as copyright infringing. The concerns over mass surveillance and privacy vulnerabilities by the proposed rule are widespread amid the government’s new drive to block “https” traffic by SNI eavesdropping (See, press release of Korea Communication Commission on February 12, 2019 and press release of MCST on May 2, 2018, both in Korean).
Intermediary Liability Campaign
Korean law (Copyright Act Article 103, Information Communication Network Act Article 44-2) requires intermediaries to take down all content for which anyone sends a takedown notice, regardless whether the content violates any right or law, not as a condition of qualifying for a safe harbor but as a positive obligation. As a result of this ‘mandatory’ notice-and-takedown system, the intermediaries are forced to take down thousands of contents daily which they believe to be perfectly lawful. Also, Korean laws require some intermediaries like P2P and cyberlockers to implement ‘technical measures’ to filter out copyright infringing material (Copyright Act, Article 104) and obscenity (Telecommunications Business Act Article 22-3 Paragraph 1), and requires all intermediaries to implement technical measures to filter out child pornography (Children and Juvenile Sex Protection Act Article 17). These ‘technical measures’ requirement ends up requiring the intermediaries to monitor each and every third party content posted on their services, turning the Internet into a space open to only those contents implicitly permitted by the intermediaries.
Open Net Korea has engaged in various efforts to bring the Korean law into compliance with the international norm, including but not limited to participating in the Steering Committee of the Manila Principles for Intermediary Liability, co-authoring a Good Practice Guideline for Intermediary Liability Regime published by the Network of Centers for Internet and Society, and calling the international community to write to the relevant officials.
Open Payment Campaign
Currently, the law requires all online payments above 300K Korean won (about US$300) to be signed by so-called “accredited certificates”, which are backed only by a Korean government agency operating as a root CA but none of the internationally recognized certificate accreditation agencies and therefore require various plugins to be downloaded from various vendors (most often through Active X technology due to the 90% plus dominance of Internet Explorer in the country) enabling and protecting the certificates. Such monolithic “closed” payment rule made the Korea-based e-commerce inaccessible for overseas customers and very inconvenient for domestic customers and indoctrinated Korean customers into a dangerous habit of accepting downloads of unknown origins, who therefore became easy targets for pfishing and other financial frauds. Open Net calls for the dismantling of the payment rule mandating use of the government-backed-certificates that are not really “accredited” in any global sense.
In 2013, Open Net ran a petition drive to file a Citizens’ Audit on the Korean Financial Services Commission responsible for implementing the closed payment rule, and obtained the sponsorship of more than 300 signatories who signed on-line at this site.
In 2013, Open Net ran a grassroots petition drive here to demand that the authorities overhaul the online payment rule so that the Korean net users can make payments without the nail-biting, computer-freezing, caution-numbing downloading of all the plugins. Several thousands have signed on putting pressure on the legislators and authorities.
In the latter half of 2013, Open Net lobbied for a Digital Signature Act amendment bill allowing digital signatures to be approved by internationally recognized root authorities and a Electronic Financial Transactions Act amendment bill requiring the Financial Services Commission rule-making to be technology-neutral in accordance with the Basel Principles. Here is the campaign headquarter page from which people will gather information and write mails, Twits, FB entries alerting the relevant lawmakers.
“Real” Child Abuse Prevention Campaign
The law punishes virtual images of imaginary children such as in animation and adult-actor films under the same legal scheme as child pornography made of video-recording or “morphing” of real children, which carry mandatory minimum sentence of 5 years for production and, among other things, 10 years of employment ban and 20 years of residential address tracking, not to mention the stigma of “child sex offenders”. Such law resulted in police actions focused on online uploading and downloading of files at the expense of depleted resources for pornography involving real children, which ironically ended up indictment of juvenile computer users as “child sex offenders”. Open Net calls for amendment of the Child and Juvenile Sexual Abuse Prevention Act to make the law serve its real purpose.
Campaign to Strike Out the Three Strikes Rule
In Korea, the copyright Three-Strikes-Out Rule came into effect on July 23, 2009 and gave the government a power to disconnect users from the Internet in the name of copyright protection. So far, although no one has been disconnected from the Internet, 408 website accounts have been shut down and 468,446 warnings or takedowns have been executed by the South Korean government (The Ministry of Culture and the Korean Copyright Commission, an entity empowered to do so without judicial scrutiny under the three-strikes rule). There is no prior judical scrutiny. The government has the full discretion in determining whether the postings or the user accounts are to be taken down or not. This is administrative censorship done fast and cheap for the rightholders, however, suppressing freedom of expression and communication and Internet users’ fundamental right to access, and endangering the future of the free and open Internet.