South Korea is crazy for baseball—it's national team made it to recent finals of the World Baseball Classic, only to lose to Japan—so it seems especially appropriate that the country would be one of the first in the world to adopt an official "three strikes" policy toward copyright infringement on the Internet. While the government can order the disconnection of individual users, a key emphasis here appears to be on websites. Host some infringing content, and the government can shut you down at its discretion.
The Korea Times has more details about the new copyright law, which passed the parliament on April 1 and goes into effect later this year.
According to the paper, the power to order Internet shutdowns won't be vested in an independent entity (as in the French HADOPI proposal) but in the government—specifically, the Minister of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, which normally spends its days organizing things like the First World Slow Walking Festival, happening later this week.
Under the new law, the government can take action against websites that host infringing content. For large websites, especially those that host user-generated content or offer online storage lockers, the law could give the government a scary level of control over their businesses. After three offenses—even if they aren't reported by the copyright holders—the government can (at its discretion) have the website taken offline for up to six months.
An anonymous source summed up the problem for the paper: "It is virtually impossible for Web portals to totally filter illegal content when there are millions of postings coming up everyday. And I am talking about companies that spend massive amounts of money to monitor copyright violations and hire hundreds of monitoring personnel. I mean, how much does the government expect us to spend in developing and operating a simple Web service? No matter how hard we try, the culture minister will easily find his three strikes and could order us to shutdown a site at anytime, regardless of whether the copyright holder has a problem with us or not."
Individual users can also be blacklisted from having Internet accounts.
While New Zealand rewrites its own graduated response law and France has to bring its bill up for a second vote, South Korea has pressed ahead and in fact gone somewhat further than most other countries considering such measures.
South Korea has long had a major piracy problem—movies, for instance, are nearly impossible to sell on DVD—and the new law looks like an attempt to squeeze the popular Internet hubs that make copyright infringement so simple.
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