A story out of Korea today reports that the "Coalition of Anti-Privacy in the Korean Movie Industry" is pushing to close down eight P2P websites for pirating their movies link here. `Internet users illegally downloading movies and recklessly reproducing them is rampant here,'' said Kim Ji-hoo, spokeswoman for the filmmakers' rights group, as quoted by The Korea Times. The article produces some no-doubt-spurious statistics on the prevalence of such piracy and the cost to the industry to make its PR point. It also is reported to have started an education campaign to inform the public about the high cost and how wrong it is. Right out of the MPAA playbook.

This story makes the same point I just made in the comment on enforcing IP rights in China. These countries will enforce IP when they have domestic constituencies that will benefit. I wonder how the defense, that a site "making available" does not constitute piracy, will play in Korea?

A second article on P2P piracy appeared in the Korean press today link here [Look for the article entitled "Internet film piracy faces crackdown". It seems the "making it available" defense would not work in this case. The accused apparently sell the downloads and have them available on what the author describes as "webhards, large-capacity web-based discs, from which members can share various digital content for free or for a small fee." The article goes on, "Prosecutors said they seized documents and computer files including a list of membership accounts and the breakdown of fees and profits the companies earned from the service." It looks like the cops have the corpus delicti (Wikipedia says I am using the term incorrectly you can look it up).