Six local Internet service providers made nearly 2 billion won (US$1.7 million) by selling pirated copies of films and broadcast materials during the June-November period, a government report on a nationwide digital piracy crackdown revealed Wednesday.

South Korea, often criticized for its loose enforcement of anti-piracy laws, pledged to get tougher on digital theft following the inauguration of the Lee Myung-bak government in February last year.

Digital theft is blamed for an annual loss of more than 2 trillion won (about US$1.5 billion) in South Korea, the world’s most wired country, with nearly 20,000 files of copyrighted content circulating illegally last year alone, according to recent government data.

During the six-month crackdown from June, police nabbed 87 people on charges of posting and circulating bootleg files of copyrighted materials on local file-sharing sites, the culture ministry said.

Among the 87, police handed over seven owners of the Web sites and five “heavy uploaders” — indicting people who received more than 5 million won from Internet service providers in return for posting pirated copies — to prosecutors. The remaining suspects will also face indictment should they have uploaded more than 5,000 files or earned more than 1 million won in profit.

The illegally made profit will be confiscated by the government under the state law on criminal proceeds, revised in March, the ministry said.

In February, a Seoul court sentenced the chiefs of the country’s top four Internet service providers to one year in prison and a 30 million won fine for facilitating illegal distribution of copyrighted content. The case marked the first time criminal charges had ever been brought against illegal online activity.

Service providers say that today’s Internet users have now become “too tech-savvy” for them to handle and that a solution should be sought by the government.

YonhapNewsAgency

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