인터넷포털에 있어서 디지털콘텐츠 이용자 보호 및 불공정거래 개선방안

Abstract

Not only present the Internet portals information from diverse sources by a tool of the search engine, but also they offer other services such as e-mail, news, blogs, stock prices, electronic transaction, entertainment, e-learning etc. The web portals has become a central place for digital contents(DC) transactions. As a few portals such as Never, Daum, Yahoo! and Paran have grown and obtained economic power, unfair trade practices against content users and content providers(CP) have been increased, which lead a result of shrinking Korea`s digital content market. Accordingly, the Korean Fair Trade Commission guided the major portal enterprises to correct their unfair agreements against users and unfair business practices against content providers in July 2008. The Korean government issued the Digital Content User Protection Guideline under the Online Digital Contents Industry Promotion Act in July 2008. Also, it provided standard agreement for DC users and standard contract for CP and portals. However, just one form of standard agreement cannot cover diverse and different features of DC transactions so that the Internet portals and other DC distributors are reluctant to adopt them. This paper examine the problems of the current standard agreement and standard contract with respect to the Internet portals, and provides some suggestion for reforming the current regulatory approaches. Different standard agreements for at least six major digital content areas such as portal, music, games, movies, e-learning, mobile are necessary. It also conducts legal analysis on unfair business practices of the major web portals.