::A Geek in Korea::

Korea’s lawmakers are following suit with the recent trend of proposing a “Three Strikes, You’re Out” rule for Korean Internet Subscribers. This is allegedly to target people guilty of copyright violations, using a graduated system. There would be a monitoring service of some kind set up to report abuse, with subscribers being cut off from the service for months at a time if found in violation accused. (See recent example, New Zealand.)

If Korea wants to comprehensively sink it’s business competitiveness internationally, this is a fantastic proposal. Korean people do pirate material, but this law isn’t going to be used to solve any of those problems. Things like MegaTV, or Hanaro TV offer legal means to see movies more easily than pirating. Getting those services with more features and better prices into more homes would do more to eliminate piracy than these sorts of laws. Hell, having people be educated about IP laws would probably be a good idea too, since most people here think that purchasing a bootleg DVD on the street corner is a perfectly acceptable thing to do.

Business-wise, this will be a disaster. It’s got too many unintended consequences, and if enforced will have a chilling effect on Korean’s Internet infrastructure, which is a key strategic business growth area. Korea’s entire strategy revolves around people on the Internet using the availabity of high speeds to do work. Does the current piracy law not have enforcement strategies that would make this system better? I doubt it.

Korean movies lose a lot because people pirate their materials ruthlessly, but their gain under this system isn’t going to offset the costs of people being punished unfairly by this new system. Imagine your office gets accused of any kind of infringement by a rival and gets cut off for months from the Internet? PC Rooms will put each other out of business with abuse of the monitoring systems. Their only reason to exist is to provide access to the Internet. How can they be sure that one of their users isn’t from a rival business trying to download something infringing on purpose?

Open access to the Internet cheaply to anyone would be in danger from this proposal. It’s going to push people underground to encrypt and move “off the grid” to get materials they want. Maybe this will have unintended positive consequences as well, but I doubt it. If the average Korean citizen moved to encrypt all their transmissions over the Internet as a result of this law, perhaps this law would backfire so spectacularly it would be worth the aggrevation. Korean Internet security isn’t the best, but if people actually start thinking about their privacy and safety on the Internet, perhaps someone will find a way to fix all of these problems and never give the government someone to step on.

It seems awfully convenient that these sorts of blanket bans would also allow the government to silence a strongly political force in Korean politics: The Outraged Netizen. If someone with a strong opinion on the Internet has to fight against being silenced every time they speak out against the government, suddenly Korea has become a less free place to live. It’s surely only a coincidence that issues like Minerva and the Beef protests that drove Korean politics recently were all organized from the Internet, right?

This is the sort of things Korean Netizens should be pissed off about, instead of jingoistic stuff they usually want to raise a fuss over. I doubt this will get the reaction things I deemed a lot less important did, because it’s not a foreign threat to a Korean’s perceived way of thinking about their country, but an internal threat to the freedoms people have here. If it doesn’t have a catchy slogan or represent some fear of outside foreign influence, will anyone care? Does anyone know how this is being reported in the Korean press?

This is a bad idea, and people should raise hell about it.  I’m not a Korean politics guy, and this isn’t a Korean politics blog, but this threatens nothing less than my lifestyle as a foreign geek blogger on the Internet. I’d be less likely to want to live in Korea if this law was enacted and enforced . I’ll be on the street chanting when the protests get started if this comes to pass.