Press Release

Open Net: KISDI Wrong on Scope of Termination Fee Ban by Net Neutrality
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KISDI Shyly Opposes Network Usage Fee Law and Admits U.S. Net Neutrality Ban on Such Fees
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Ofcom Releases Review on Net Neutrality
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Part 8 of Open Net’s Special Lecture Series on Media Literacy – To Interpret Laws in Conformity With the Constitution: In the Face of a Changing Media Environment (14:00 November 8, Online)
Part 8 of Open Net’s Special Lecture Series on Media Literacy To Interpret Laws in Conformity With...
‘Comfort Women’ Resource Center, Now Online
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LITIGATION
Open Net Won the Trial Against KT for Disclosure of Subscriber’s Personal Information
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Open Net Won the Personal Information Disclosure Lawsuit against KT
Open Net General Counsel Kelly Kim won the lawsuit for the disclosure of her personal information...
Open Net Successfully Defended the Police Defamation Victim HONG Ga-hye at the Supreme Court
Open Net provided legal support to Ga-hye Hong, who was accused of "defamation of the maritime...
Open Net Filed a Constitutional Challenge against the Mandatory Mobile Phone Registration Law
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Court of appeals confirmed that the blocking of “North Korea Tech” website is unlawful
Court of appeals confirmed that the blocking of “North Korea Tech” website is unlawful The right...
OPEN SEMINAR
RightsCon 2022: What Will European Commission’s Grand Plan to “Charge” the Internet Do to Asia?
What is "network usage fee"? : What will European Commission’s grand plan to "charge" the internet...

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)
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[Press Conference] Open Net · Institute for Inclusive Society Announces Research Results on “Digital Literacy Problems and Solutions for the Elderly” (May 23)
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Open Net Co-hosts Open Government Week as Part of the Open Government Partnership
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Part 1 of Open Net’s Special Lecture Series on Media Literacy (14:00 April 5, online)
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COURT ACTIONS
Open Net Successfully Defended the Police Defamation Victim HONG Ga-hye at the Supreme Court
Open Net provided legal support to Ga-hye Hong, who was accused of "defamation of the maritime...
Open Net Filed a Constitutional Challenge against the Mandatory Mobile Phone Registration Law
Please read the Korean original here.
Court of appeals confirmed that the blocking of “North Korea Tech” website is unlawful
Court of appeals confirmed that the blocking of “North Korea Tech” website is unlawful The right...
Open Net Filed for Civil Damages against NIS and Investigative Authorities for Unlawful Warrantless Access to Subscriber Information
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The Court Dismissed Copyright Troll’s Claim against BitTorrent Users – Open Net Successfully Defends Internet Users!
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education
Female Cyber Security Expert Training Program Course Registration: 2023 Human Resource Training Course in the Cyber Security Field – 2nd Round of Online Course Registration
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[Press Conference] [Korean Civil Society in Support of Democracy in Myanmar] “Spring Revolution, We Stand in Solidarity with Myanmar People”
After two years of Myanmar's military coup and massacre, the Civil disobedience movement and...
![[Webtoon] Return of the Guardian of Net Neutrality](https://www.opennetkorea.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/스크린샷-2023-01-30-오후-3.08.27.png)
[Webtoon] Return of the Guardian of Net Neutrality
The Ministry of Justice’s Proposed Amendments to the Civil Act Creating Publicity Rights Raise Serious Freedom of Speech Concerns
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Open Net Korea Annual Report 2023
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POLICY RESEARCH

Open Net Hosts “AI, Ethics & Data Governance: From International Trends to Korea’s New Data Laws” Conference on January 20
Open Net hosts the international conference, "AI, Ethics & Data Governance: From...

Open Net to Host ‘Can the Sharing Economy Help Reduce Economic Inequality?’ Seminar on December 16
Open Net will be hosting a seminar on the topic of 'Can the Sharing Economy Help Reduce Economic...
November 7, 2019 Special Seminar on Reforming Interconnection Rules
Toward Free and Fair Internet Ecosystem: Special Seminar on Reforming Interconnection Rules ...

Open Net Hosts ‘The Current Status of Freedom of Expression in the Republic of Korea’ Conference with Special Host David Kaye, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression
Open Net will be hosting a conference with special host David Kaye, the UN Special Rapporteur on...
Open Net Co-Hosts “State Surveillance in the Korean Society and Privacy Protection in the Digital Age,” a Seminar with Mr. Joseph Cannataci, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy
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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.