Stop Internet Censoring

Susie Kim

Published in

Commons Foundation

4 min readMay 17, 2019

Sponsors

This campaign is sponsored by the Commons Foundation, Jinbonet, and Opennet.

We have seen many attempts to censor the Internet under the pretext of copyright protection. Notorious attempts are SOPA and PIPA of 2012, which triggered the largest online protest in history and was eventually withdrawn, and ACTA, a plurilateral trade deal killed by the European Parliament in 2012.

Now, the Korean government tries to enact a much stronger internet censoring rule. If it passes the legislative body, a copyright protection agency may cut off access to websites that the agency views as copyright infringing. The concerns over mass surveillance and privacy vulnerabilities by the proposed rule are widespread amid the government’s new drive to block “https” traffic by SNI eavesdropping (See, a press release of Korea Communication Commission on February 12, 2019, and press release of MCST on May 2, 2018, both in Korean).

Proposed Bill to Block File Sharing Websites

According to the proposed bill, the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST) may order internet connection service providers, or ISPs, to block users’ access to foreign websites that allow unauthorized sharing of copyrighted materials (proposed Article 133bis (1)(iii)).

Also, the Korea Copyright Protection Agency (KCoPA), a governmental body, may recommend ISPs to take the blocking measure (proposed Article 133ter (1)(iv)). The bill, having passed the relevant committee in December 2017, is waiting for approval of the Legislation and Judiciary Committee, the final hurdle before the plenary session.

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 the 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.

Who Supports the Bill and Why?

Copyright holders, especially web-based cartoon creators vehemently support the bill. They are backed by copyright bureaus such as MCST and KCoPA who want to strengthen their own authorities. Webcomic writers have suffered from pirate sites such as “Bam Tokki”. Due to this suffering, they were captured by the myth that the bill would effectively address piracy problems by quickly blocking pirate sites, more specifically by shortening the time in making an administrative decision for blocking from two months to two weeks.

But the rhetoric of “two months v. two weeks” is misleading. Under the current blocking rules and procedures, the communication authorities may make a decision in two weeks. In reality, the Korea Communication Standard Commission built up a task force to combat piracy and proclaimed that its examination on blocking would complete in four days.

What the bill makes matters worse is skyrocketing of websites blocked by KCSC for the purpose of copyright protection. The bill provoked competition between administrative bodies in holding the blocking power. As shown in the chart below, after the bill passed the relevant standing committee of the National Assembly in December 2017 and the webcomic writers have crusaded to make the bill enacted, KCSC’s blocking decisions have tripled in 2018 (from 777 in 2017 to 2,338 in 2018). Further, KCSC tries to simplify the reporting and examination procedures for blocking decisions, implying weakened procedural fairness.