COPYRIGHT AND AI IN SOUTH KOREA
Korea aspires to create a global standard for copyright protection against unlawful AI scraping
Let´s keep following the thread about "Asians don´t regulate AI" and "no copyright respect in Asia". And yes, go back to South Korea to vanquish common places again.
The South Korean music industry has officially declared 'war' on AI copyright infrigment. And this move is not an isolated incident; it represents a tipping point in the rapidly escalating global conflict between creative industries and Generative AI developers over unauthorized data scraping and model training. We are seeing similar legal and regulatory clashes erupting across the Globe, like in Europe, USA, China (with recent rulings on AI outputs and copyright), India, or Canada.
In South Korea, the movement against AI copyright infringement is being spearheaded by a newly formed, unprecedented coalition called the K-Music Rights Organization Mutual Growth Committee, that involves the entire rights chain of the music industry, uniting six major organizations.
They issued a joint declaration titled “In the AI era, we declare the noble sovereignty of human creation”. In it, they outline three specific demands to protect creators from "big capital and algorithms":
1.- A ban on unauthorized AI training without the explicit consent of the creators.
2.- Mandatory transparency in AI generation processes.
3.- Clear standards that distinguish human-created works from AI-generated outputs.
Beyond these immediate demands, the coalition has agreed to stop responding to AI challenges individually and has established a joint AI response task force and a single-window negotiation system. Their broader, long-term ambition is to position South Korea as the global "rule maker" by building a "K-Copyright Standard Model" (Do you listen, European Commision?). To achieve this, they plan to develop a blockchain-based integrated infrastructure that consolidates fragmented rights data. This system will link global identification codes (such as ISWC for compositions and ISRC for sound recordings) with YouTube's Content ID and South Korea's Universal Content Identifier (UCI) to effectively track, collect, and distribute royalties in real time.
No wonder why South Korea, whre culture is acknowledge as an strategic asset for their economy (just K-POP represents about 1% or their GDP) is moving in the right direction, my problem is to understand why not Europe.
