The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (Minister HWANG Hee, MCST) held the 5^th intellectual property protection consultative body meeting[1] on Dec 23^rd (Thursday) to discuss the measures to respond to global Intellectual Property violations of Korean content. This meeting was held virtually due to COVID-19.

The intellectual property protection consultative body meeting is convened biannually as a regular meeting for intellectual property protection in the content area to foster the spread of Hallyu content. It has reinforced the cooperation to identify violation status and jointly respond to the violations.  

The agenda of this meeting focused on the measures to counter breaches of IP Korean content outside Korea. Before the discussion, Kakao Entertainment Legal Director, LEE Ho Jun helped the participants to have a better understanding of the corporate countermeasures by presenting the cases on current violations of webtoon copyright and how the corporation responds to them.

The participants from sixteen right holder organizations suggested the following ideas: ⅰ) supporting the monitoring activities that are possible only within each country to detect illegal distributions of content, ⅱ) shutting down the illicit websites and punishing the operators instead of blocking access to the websites, ⅲ) encouraging Korean National Policy Agency and MCST Special Judicial Police to have continued interest in illicit transmission from Korea. In addition, they made propositions to establish more foreign copyright office branches, reinforce local support, introduce copyright registration and authentication schemes dedicated to films, and amend the copyright law related to online performance royalties and illicit Internet protocol television.

“We strive to expand the horizon of the content market and establish local copyright protection rules by participating in numerous FTAs including RCEP,” The first vice minister of MCST KIM Hyun Hwan said. “As we see the global interest increasing in our culture such as Hangeul and Kimchi thanks to the popularity of Hallyu (Korean wave) content, we are going to stress the importance of IP protection in other countries publicly with the institutions gathered here today and seek countermeasures to respond to IP violations for Korean content development.”