매체물의 특성을 고려한 심의제도 구축에 관한 시론적 연구

Abstract

In recent years, there has been much controversy regarding content regulation systems for newly introduced media-products, such as music videos, web-toons, and mobile applications. This controversy contains both regulation result issues and regulation structure issues. This study focuses on the latter, as regulation structure issues are fundamental causes of this controversy. The ultimate goal is to separately present all the proper content regulation systems for each media-product. However, this goal can hardly be achieved in a short time. Thus, this study instead tries to provide the theoretical basis for such work as a preliminary step. “Media” is a term that describes the various transmission methods of human expression such as press (off-line) media, broadcasting media, and telecommunication media. “Media-products” are the different types of contents or expressions that are contained in or transmitted through the media, such as movies, dramas, advertisements, and music video. Media-products are included under the protection of freedom of expression. However, this can be limited by media-product content regulation systems for the purpose of protecting the youth, guaranteeing the consumers’ right to know, and to some extent, securing the creator’s freedom of expression. Thus, regulation systems can be constitutionally legitimate only when they are constructed and operated with a proper balance between the creator’s freedom of expression and the above public interests, especially protection of the youth. Current media-product content regulation systems are constructed not by media-product standards, but instead by media standards. Only a few exceptions are established in the case of certain media-products that have prominent characteristics, such as movies, games, and advertisements. It can be said that the current system is based on media-oriented vertical regulation systems. However, this system no longer fits into the contemporary media environment. In order to distribute certain media-products through various media, the products should pass each of the content regulation procedures. Thus, from a constitutional perspective, this not only infringes on the freedom of expression, but also impairs youth protection. Many solutions to this problem have been proposed, such as unifying all regulation organizations or switching to a EU-type horizontal regulation system. However, every method has certain limitations. The former has practical problems, considering the historical aspect of each content regulation institution, and the latter has problems similar to those of media-oriented vertical regulation systems. Therefore, in the long term, the current system needs to be changed to a media-products-oriented horizontal regulation system. In this system, once each media-products regulation institution conducts contents regulation for the corresponding media-products with considering the characteristic of that media-products enough, those media-products can be distributed through all other media without additional content regulation. For this, it is necessary to try and separate a particular media-product regulation system from the current media-oriented system, when we can distinguish the characteristics of that media-products from those of other media-products enough. A future series of studies will deal with concrete content regulation systems for each media-product separately. In these works, the so-called ‘interdisciplinary methodology’ will be required. This methodology is used to determine the characteristics of media-products from a media studies point of view (step 1), to analyze the current status of the media-product content regulation system (step 2), and to review the system from a legal studies point of view (step 3).