Torrent "Settlement Money Exploitation" Surges... Copyright Lawsuits Increase Tenfold in Five Years

Assemblyman Jin Jongoh:
"Urgent Need for Guidelines to Protect First-Time Offenders"

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Users who have downloaded videos via Torrent even once are being considered "illegal distributors" and are facing mass lawsuits. Due to the structural characteristic where automatic uploading occurs simultaneously with downloading, users unintentionally become distributors. Article 136 of the Copyright Act stipulates up to five years of imprisonment or a fine of up to 50 million won for infringement acts such as reproduction and distribution.

On September 30, Assemblyman Jin Jongoh of the National Assembly's Culture, Sports and Tourism Committee pointed out, "It is urgent to establish guidelines to prevent settlement money exploitation and to protect first-time users." According to data received by Assemblyman Jin's office from the National Police Agency, the number of copyright infringement complaints and accusations increased nearly tenfold from 6,216 cases in 2021 to 59,557 cases last year. During the same period, the number of people referred to the prosecution also surged more than fivefold, from 2,195 to 10,067.

The "conditional education system" for first-time offenders is also overloaded. According to the Korea Copyright Commission, the number of people referred for education rose from 521 in 2021 to 6,667 last year, and as of August this year, there were 8,171 people on the waiting list. The number of members in victim groups on portal cafes alone exceeds 150,000, and there are about 250,000 related posts.

Cases of abuse continue to emerge. In December last year, an unauthorized copyright trust management operator who distributed movie files on Torrent and then sued users who downloaded them collected about 40 million won in settlement money and was sentenced to 10 months in prison, suspended for two years. In April of the same year, there was a case where a company without a lawyer's license contracted with a production company of a box office failure, uploaded the files directly to Torrent, sued about 1,000 people, and collected 800 million won.

Assemblyman Jin emphasized, "Indiscriminate lawsuits are being filed even though there are no criteria to distinguish between first-time and habitual offenders, resulting in a serious waste of investigative resources." He added, "The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism must now establish clear guidelines for complaints and accusations to fundamentally block settlement money exploitation and supplement protection measures for ordinary users."

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