South Korea Wants To Allow Its Copyright Protection Agency To Block Sites Allegedly Holding Infringing Material -- No Judicial Review Required

South Korea Wants To Allow Its Copyright Protection Agency To Block Sites Allegedly Holding Infringing Material -- No Judicial Review Required

5 years ago
Anonymous $fWzGa1uP8i

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190411/07524441978/south-korea-wants-to-allow-copyright-protection-agency-to-block-sites-allegedly-holding-infringing-material-no-judicial-review.shtml

These are dark days for freedom on the Internet. As Cory Doctorow wrote in a recent post on Boing Boing: "We are witnessing the realtime, high-speed Chinafication of the western internet." Country after country is adopting laws that undermine freedom of speech, usually in the name of "enforcing" copyright, which is apparently more important. Add South Korea to that list of shame. The government there is proposing to give its existing Copyright Protection Agency the power to cut off access to Web sites that it says have infringing material. A new campaign, "Stop Internet Censoring", has been launched to fight the plans:

The censoring proposal is a move to strengthen the Korean three-strikes-out rule and implement the "website shutting down" obligation under the US-Korea FTA. Governmental measures to block, without any prior judicial scrutiny, access to foreign websites that host illegal information is not new. For several years from 1990s, the communication authorities have blocked and filtered contents deemed illegal and violating social norms, including those violating others' copyright. But the proposed bill is new in that the copyright protection agency holds a power to block website access.