South Korean Prosecutors Reject Charges Against Thousands Of Uploaders

from the no-mass-infringement-cases dept

Last month, we noted that a group of mostly Japanese porn publishers tried to bring charges against 10,000 people under South Korea's harsh new copyright laws, claiming that they were guilty of uploading copyrighted material. More recently, those same publishers announced plans to increase the number sued to nearly 65,000. Well, that plan may not be getting very far as Michael Scott alerts us to the news that South Korean prosecutors have rejected the charges against those 10,000 uploaders, instead saying they would just charge 10 "habitual offenders," though those offenders may face jail time.

Filed Under: prosecution, south korea, uploaders

Google Doesn't Want To Disclose Korean YouTube Uploaders; Turns Feature Off Instead

from the letter,-not-the-spirit dept

Some new internet regulations recently went into effect in South Korea, forcing sites with more than 100,000 users per day to confirm users' personal information before they upload content or leave comments, so they can ensure people post content under their real names. The cutoff was lowered from sites with 300,000 daily users, and the new, lower bar caught YouTube Korea. But instead of complying with the system, Google has instead disabled uploading and comments on its Korean site (via PaidContent). Google's stance on censorship of its search results in China garnered it a lot of bad press; the fact that YouTube Korea lags behind other local video sites in popularity probably made this latest decision a bit easier. Apparently, though, people can easily get around the ban by using versions of YouTube aimed at other countries -- highlighting the frivolity of these sorts of laws given the global nature of the internet. Unless countries want to go as far as setting up Great Firewalls of their own, users will easily circumvent the rules, should they so desire.

Filed Under: korea, privacy, uploaders, users, verification, video
Companies: google