Two months ago, a collection of fifty US and Japan-based adult movie studios filed a mass copyright complaint against around 10,000 South Koreans accused of being heavy uploaders of porn.
The studios also filed suit against 80 websites accused of aiding and abetting the distribution of the illegally uploaded movies.
A National Police Agency spokesman said that the lawsuit was filed at 10 police stations in the South Korean capital, Seoul, and in the Gyeonggi province. The studios asked the police to investigate the infringements, which carry a potential jail sentence.
However, from the 10,000 complaints issued, prosecutors charged just 10 people with copyright infringement. In response, the disappointed studios say they will fight back. Next week they promise to re-file their lawsuit, but this time will increase the number of individuals accused to 65,000.
Kim Han-Seo, a lawyer representing the movie producers, said that the prosecutors were not tough enough so they had decided to up the ante.
“Now, we’ve drawn up a new list of some 65,000 users who fit this guideline,” he said. “We’ll see whether the prosecutors will press charges against them all.”
As we reported earlier on our sister site FreakBits, at the end of August distributors of a hit Korean disaster movie called in the police after it was leaked to the Internet and was downloaded 100,000 times. Kim Han-Seo said that the Korean authorities had responded quickly to that local problem, but accused them of different standards when it comes to protecting foreign content, such as the material produced by his porn movie employers.
“We believe that [the prosecution] should not be discriminatory in applying copyright laws. Illegal copying and distribution run rampant in Korea because it is one of the world’s most wired countries. We decided to take legal action to minimize our past business losses and to protect anticipated future profits,” he said.
The threat now is that if the local Korean authorities fails to act in a way that pleases the porn producers, they will take their case directly to the US government instead.
The initial lawsuit indicated that the studios had also harvested the IP addresses of around 100,000 individuals who downloaded the adult movies but to date, there is no indication that they will become a target.
