CRIMINAL COPYRIGHT ENFORCEMENT IN CHINA AND SOUTH KOREA – A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

This paper describes criminal copyright enforcement in South Korea and China, arguing that the different position of copyright in both countries is explained by internal differences in goals and institutional mechanisms in the two countries, not by Confucian notions of authorship and originality or by socialist ideology or by external pressures from the international trading system. The paper assembles data regarding copyright enforcement that show dramatic differences between China and South Korea. Moreover, the paper describes the legal differences between the coverage of criminal copyright in the two countries, differences that would at least allow for major differences in enforcement. In addition to filling in the data, the paper also adds a more qualitative description of the position of copyright in the governance and ideological structure of the two countries. In particular, the paper contrasts China's goal of controlling content for censorship purposes and Korea's goal of increasing the exports of Korean cultural products. The former has led to weak protections of authors and targeting infringement actions against 'prohibited conduct'; the latter to strong protection to protect the entities that produce copyrights products.