MUMBAI: South Korean prosecutors indicted NHN Corp., and Daum Communications Corp., the nation’s two largest Web portal operators, on Tuesday on charges of facilitating on-line piracy.
The Seoul Central District Public Prosecutors’ Office said it indicted NHN, operator of the country’s largest portal Naver, and Daum and one affiliate under each company for not restricting illegal trading of copyrighted music files through their various services.
The prosecutors, in their filing with the court, sought 30 million won (US$22,270) each from NHN and Daum. The indictment marks the first criminal charges ever brought against portals related to illegal downloading.
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The investigation began after the Korea Music Copyright Association, a group of record companies, sued the two homegrown tech giants in July, complaining they were suffering a dramatic drop in sales due to illegal downloading on portals. Prosecutors raided the companies’ headquarters in October.
Blogs and on-line communities hosted by Naver and Daum have become popular havens for sharing free, unlicensed music and movie files.
The chief executives of the two companies, who have been questioned by prosecutors, were not indicted due to lack of evidence proving they personally neglected to monitor the pirated material.
The investigation concluded that Naver hosted some 10 million illegal music files, amounting to nearly 25 terabytes, on its on-line communities and blogs. Daum’s services carried some 10 terabytes, or 3.4 million illegal music files.
The companies were negligent in not using an already-developed technology that prevents uploading of pirated content, prosecutors said.
They also failed to answer to copyright holders’ request to delete unlicensed music postings and allowed continued uploading of copyrighted material, according to prosecutors.
Record companies accuse major portals of ignoring the legality of the content on popular pages they host because they bring in ad revenue. Punishing individual Internet users, many of them teenage students, is not a solution, they say.
In a major case involving an on-line operator in 2006, police investigated the head of NCsoft Co., a Seoul-based Internet game developer, for allegedly facilitating piracy. He was not charged.
Prosecutors adopted a stricter policy this year to crack down on on-line copyright infringement. South Korea is one of the world’s most wired nations, with 95 percent of households connected to high-speed Internet.
An appeals court recently affirmed a 10-month jail sentence and a fine of 5 million won (US$3,426) for a man who posted unlicensed movie files on the Internet for profit.
