Cracking Down on Copyright

By Brad

Recently, a French law that would sever the Internet connection of online pirates went down in defeat. Now, Ars Technica reports, South Korea has picked up the idea:

South Korea is crazy for baseball—it’s national team made it to recent finals of the World Baseball Classic, only to lose to Japan—so it seems especially appropriate that the country would be one of the first in the world to adopt an official “three strikes” policy toward copyright infringement on the Internet. While the government can order the disconnection of individual users, a key emphasis here appears to be on websites. Host some infringing content, and the government can shut you down at its discretion.

There’s a problem with focusing on individual websites, however:

An anonymous source summed up the problem for the paper: “It is virtually impossible for Web portals to totally filter illegal content when there are millions of postings coming up everyday. And I am talking about companies that spend massive amounts of money to monitor copyright violations and hire hundreds of monitoring personnel. I mean, how much does the government expect us to spend in developing and operating a simple Web service? No matter how hard we try, the culture minister will easily find his three strikes and could order us to shutdown a site at anytime, regardless of whether the copyright holder has a problem with us or not.”

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.