Eradicating Unfair Practices in the Content Industry

Strengthening Cooperation Between the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Fair Trade Commission... Establishing a Foundation for Fair Trade

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism is joining forces with the Fair Trade Commission to improve unfair practices in the content sector. On the 20th, Minister Park Bo-gyun of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism met with Fair Trade Commission Chairman Han Ki-jung at the National Museum of Korea and agreed on the need to establish a foundation for fair trade. Both parties recognized that inter-ministerial cooperation is essential and decided to continuously identify and discuss collaborative matters.

Minister Park stated, "It is necessary to expand specific cases of collaboration, such as increasing survey questions related to unfair practices in investigations of the popular culture and arts industry and outsourced broadcasting program production transactions, and having both ministries jointly participate in the opinion-gathering process when drafting or revising standard contracts in the comics sector." In response, Chairman Han said, "Eradicating unfair practices in the content sector is one of our core tasks," adding, "We are responding comprehensively not only to unfair acts related to the distribution of copyrighted works and copyright enforcement by content distributors and producers but also to unfair contract terms and unjust subcontracting practices."

In fact, the Fair Trade Commission inspected unfair contract terms of twenty companies involved in comics, webtoons, and web novels, including production companies, publishers, and platform operators, in April. Since last month, it has been conducting ex officio investigations into unfair subcontracting practices occurring during outsourced production processes targeting about ten companies in the gaming and music industries. Chairman Han stated, "We also plan to announce the results soon of the review regarding a case where a competitor obstructed the collection of copyright fees in the domestic music copyright consignment management market."

The first collaborative task is expected to be the enactment of the "Act on the Creation of a Fair Distribution Environment in the Cultural Industry." On this day, with the bill’s passage in mind, they agreed to sign a memorandum of understanding to strengthen information gathering and establish an organic case-handling system. A Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism official said, "This is a core task of the Yoon Suk-yeol administration’s content policy and a national agenda item," adding, "We expect that cooperation between the industry promotion ministry (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism) and the regulatory agency (Fair Trade Commission) will provide momentum."

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