링크사이트에 의한 저작권침해 확산에 대한 입법적 대응방안 연구

Abstract

The Korean Supreme Court has been consistently denying the possibility that the act of providing links to other's work on the Internet might be a direct infringement of copyright. Furthermore, after the Supreme Court ruling on the so-called 'Chewing' case, in which the court didn't see the act of providing links to illegal copies as a contributory infringement act for the infringement act of those who uploaded illegal copies. Despite the extensive criticism about the 'Chewing Case', over two and a half years have elapsed, yet the case has not been changed. In the meantime, the link sites that take advertisement revenue by providing links to the illegal copies stored in the private web storage in special technological ways became popular and have been causing the massive loss of the copyright owners. In the case of foreign countries, it is difficult to find a country that denies both the direct and indirect infringement liability of link providers like our country. Especially in the case of EU, they have taken the position of acknowledging direct infringement, by seeing providing links to illegal copies as an act of public communication under the additional requirement of subjective element such as knowledge of the illegality of the copies. Based on this situation, I think that it is time to hasten legislation to protect the legitimate rights and interests of copyright holders from abusing linking to illegal copies. In conclusion, it is necessary to revise the copyright law for this. The direction of revision is to find a good harmonizing point between protecting the rights and interests of the copyright owners and preventing the chilling effects on Internet users by avoiding over-restriction of the freedom of linking. Specifically, introducing a new provision that sees providing of link to illegal copies as an infringement of copyright with the requirement of knowledge of the illegality is proposed as the first proposal, and furthermore, I suggest an alternative to reduce the concern about freedom of linking as the second proposal.