The Seoul District Court on Wednesday sentenced three people to up to two years in prison for circulating pirated copies of the domestic summer blockbuster “Haeundae”, in one of the harshest-yet punishments for the crime.

An illegal copy of the big-budget disaster flick was uploaded onto two file-sharing site on Aug. 29 and was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times in Korea and China, causing massive losses for the film’s creators and distributors ahead of its overseas release.

“Haeundae,” about a tsunami that hits a popular beach in the Korean port city of Busan, has drawn more than 10 million viewers at home, becoming the fifth South Korean movie to reach the milestone. Released locally in August, the movie has been sold to 24 countries including China and the United States.

An audio technician, who received the movie file from its producer CJ Entertainment to make an adaptation for the visually impaired, had passed the file on to a friend who took it to China and showed it to some of his acquaintances. A Korean student studying in China later uploaded the file on the Internet.

The technician and his friend were sentenced to a year and a half in prison with a two-year suspension, while the student was sentenced to two years on a three-year suspension, the Seoul Central District Court said.

“The court saw the necessity to sentence the defendants with imprisonment considering the damage their action caused to the local movie industry and to prevent similar incidents in the future,” the court said.

Local filmmakers and investors have been fearing the case may tarnish the reputation of the cinema industry in South Korea, the world’s most wired country where digital theft is blamed for an annual loss of more than 2 trillion won (US$ 1.6 billion).

With a majority of households connected to broadband Internet, technology has made it easy for anyone to duplicate and distribute copyrighted creative works including movies, books, music and broadcast programs.

The size of the legal downloading market shrank by nearly 60 percent last year from 2005 in Korea, with nearly 20,000 files of copyrighted content circulating illegally last year alone, according to government data.

YonhapNewsAgency

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