Supreme Court: "Dismissal of Prosecution Canceled, Retrial Required from First Instance"

Conflicting Judgments in First and Second Trials of Copyright Law Violation Case

[Asia Economy Reporter Baek Kyunghwan] The Supreme Court has ruled that when a second-instance court cancels a dismissal of prosecution, the case must be remanded to the first-instance court for retrial.

On the 16th, the Supreme Court's First Division (Presiding Justice Kwon Soon-il) announced that in the final appeal trial of Mr. A, deputy head of a pharmaceutical manufacturing company's research institute, who was indicted for violating the Copyright Act, it overturned both the original court's guilty verdict and the first-instance court's not guilty verdict, and sent the case back to the Suwon District Court Seongnam Branch, the first-instance court.

Mr. A had been on trial for submitting a request to the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety in June 2012 to recognize Chilean rosehip powder as a "functional ingredient," attaching related academic papers without the copyright holder's permission.

The first-instance court found that Mr. A's attachment of the papers without permission in the functional ingredient recognition application constituted copyright infringement. However, it dismissed the prosecution, stating that the complaint was ineffective because the legally prescribed period had passed.

Article 140 of the Copyright Act stipulates that unless the copyright infringement is for "commercial purposes," a complaint must be filed within a set period for prosecution to proceed. In other words, copyright infringement without commercial intent is a "complaint crime" that requires a proper complaint for trial.

The court held that the term "commercial purposes" in this provision should be narrowly interpreted as cases where direct profit is sought from copyright infringement. It judged that although Mr. A's attachment of the papers was for selling rosehip, the risk of large-scale or repeated infringement was low, making it difficult to view it as for direct profit, and thus it should be considered a complaint crime requiring a proper complaint.

The court pointed out that the copyright holder filed the complaint one and a half years after learning that the papers were used without permission, deeming it an improper complaint. For complaint crimes, prosecution is only possible if the complaint is filed within six months from the day the offender is known.

The second-instance court, unlike the first-instance court, found that Mr. A had commercial intent. If the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety recognized the ingredient, significant profits could be made from selling the product. Therefore, it judged this case as a non-complaint crime, unaffected by the complaint period, and based on this, it conducted the substantive trial and sentenced Mr. A to a fine of 2 million won.

However, both the first and second-instance rulings were overturned by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court found no fault with the second-instance court's decision to cancel the dismissal of prosecution. However, it found procedural errors in the second-instance court's cancellation of the first-instance court's dismissal and proceeding to the substantive trial without remanding the case.

The court stated, "It is a violation of the law that the second-instance court, while overturning the first-instance court's dismissal of prosecution, did not remand the case to the first-instance court but proceeded to the substantive trial and sentenced the defendants to guilty."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.