한미 FTA와 지적재산권의 미래

Abstract

On February 3, 2006, the United States and South Korea has begun negotiations towards a bilateral free trade agreement(FTA), which would expect to take up to a year. Among 17 sectors with which the parties have dealt, the US has expressed much stronger concern on intellectual property protection comparing to US-Singapore or Chile FTA. This paper examines several copyright issues, which are disputable in this negotiations since the US requests to Korea certain level of protection exceeding the international standards and wholesale adoption of US IP laws, such as copyright term extension by 20 years, a stronger sanctions on circumvention of technological measures (access control), and the stipulations of temporary reproduction, temporary restraining order, statutory damages, rights management information, OSP liability, etc. Copyright laws grant certain exclusive rights to authors, but the privileges are ultimately associated with public interests. The US courts and legislatures saw the need to limit the scope of IP monopoly. The “fair-use doctrine" and “misuse doctrine" reflect this need for limitations on IP rights. Since the US has demanded only the aspect of strengthening the exclusive rights, if Korea would adopt whole of this proposal, Korea copyright laws could not strike a proper balance between providing adequate copyright protection and promoting public access to a copyrighted work. Not only do the Korean legal system differ from the US system, but also Korea copyright laws which do not have a copyright misuse clause and a broad standard of the fair-use as the US copyright law, is not ready to adopt the US proposal.