May 27, 2009

Korean IP Law Poses Hurdle to Korean Bloggers

Fearing new Korean laws aimed to thwart online copyright infringement, Google has shut off audio uploads to its local blogging site, the Korea Times reports. This has the consequence of barring the publication of both (the local version of) fair use and licensed work.  The baby and the bathwater are both jettisoned.  Indeed, this seems a natural result of many who argue for maximalist IP protection.

Google has banned subscribers to its Korean blogging platform, Textcube (www.textcube.org), from uploading songs onto their blogs, citing the country's new anti-file sharing provisions aimed at thwarting online piracy. This is the first time that the U.S. giant has disabled its bloggers from posting music files on their personal Web pages. 

As of Monday, Textcube users were blocked from uploading MP3, WMA, WAV and other types of music files on their blogs, while existing songs were blinded and are now accessible only to the logged-in owners of the blogs. 

Posted by Anupam Chander on May 27, 2009 at 09:00 AM in Digitization | Permalink