Time for us to get serious for a moment, and talk politics.

A couple of months ago, fellow writer Nabeela wrote a post speculating about the potential effects of SOPA on our online K-pop livelihood if it were to pass. Today, we will be taking a look at the issue of SOPA from a hindsight perspective, as well as looking further into similar policies across the globe, and what they hold for the future of K-pop.

Since this is a pretty lengthy topic, I’ve enlisted the help of Gil and Fannie to help me to cover different aspects of the issue.

Gil will start the article off by providing an overview of the recent events that brought about the downfall of SOPA. Fannie will elaborate about our dependence (as international K-pop consumers) on material that may violate certain copyright claims, and then go on to look at international policies that currently pose a threat to our internet freedoms (with a focus on Europe). To bring it into full circle, I (Maddie) will then take a look at South Korea as a model for the future internet and music industries.

What was SOPA/PIPA?

On January 18th, 2012, many high school and college students hoping for a quick review of whatever assignment they didn’t read stumbled upon a blacked out Wikipedia page. It turns out, the popular website had been shut down for a full day in protest to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill being deliberated in the House of Representatives. Other websites that participated in this online blackout included but was not limited to high-profile websites such as Google, Reddit, and Mozilla as well as approximately 7000 smaller websites, who coordinated to posting blurbs, links, and images that helped spread awareness of the threat that SOPA and its equivalent in the Senate, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), posed to the Internet at large.



So what was SOPA and why was it so objectionable in the first place?

What the bill — introduced by Representative Lamar Smith of Texas and supported by the MPAA — effectively was designed to do was to reduce access to websites “dedicated to infringing activities” and operating outside of US borders.

Sounds perfectly reasonable, right?



The problem with the bill was that it was so broad in scope and vaguely worded that it actually gave government as well as large corporations (such as giant media companies) way too much power to exercise against peoples’ freedom of expression.

In Section 103, Subpoint b the bill outlined its target:

“The U.S. directed site is primarily designed or operated for the purpose of, has only limited purpose or use other than or is marketed by its operator or another acting in concert with that operator for use in offering goods or services in a manner that engages in, enables or facilitates — a violation of section 501…”

To put it in blunt terms, SOPA would have helped to legally enact a powerful form of online censorship at the whims of the government and major corporations. Here are some consequences of the bill had it come to pass (and more here and here):

The US government and copyright holders would be given the authority to seek court orders against any website in any way suspected to be associated with copyright violation

Private parties would able to directly contact payment network providers to block a site’s traffic, search traffic, and ad revenue without prior notice or a judicial hearing. This is a direct violation of the First Amendment.

The US government would be allowed to block US citizens from visiting websites on their blacklist in the form of DNS blocking (the same method that is used in China , Iran , and Syria )

A single infringing link would be enough to warrant blocking a site full of otherwise legal material. In addition, sites would be held responsible for user-submitted content. To put it in physical terms, say someone brought a disk of pornography into a library and accidentally left it on the shelf, and the disk is later discovered during a routine inspection. The entire library could be shut down due to this incident, despite that they had no hand in orchestrating it.



Links shared through email or social networking sites could be closely monitored or censored



A higher legal risk means less incentive for web innovation and less launching of start-ups

Luckily, the January 18th Internet Blackout was able to get enough people aware of and talking about the issue that it managed to even grab the attention of the mainstream national media.

In addition, grassroots activism such as people calling their Congressmen, protesting, signing petitions (4.5 million people signed Google’s anti-SOPA petition in that one day), and tweeting the message resulted soon after in changing quite a few Congressman’s minds. (We have to remember that computers have only been widely used in the last decade or two while many of these politicians are well into their fifties or beyond, meaning that their understanding of the internet and its integral relationship with the youth generation is limited at best.)

As a result, both bills were successfully pressured to be taken off the table… for further study. Victory..?!

How would SOPA/PIPA have affected us in relation to K-pop?

Let’s put this in the context of Seoulbeats: we blog extensively about K-pop, a niche of entertainment which includes a lot of music, television shows (dramas, performance shows, variety shows), and movies that are all susceptible to being pirated. Seoulbeats itself obviously does not host pirated material, but regardless, under SOPA, we would have still been fair game to whims of private outside interests. For example, if we happened to embed a video in one of our articles that was not obtained from an official source, or if one of our commenters happened to link to an outside site that happened to be guilty of copyright violation, access to our site could be taken down immediately and without prior notice.

And it wouldn’t have just affected this site, but almost all K-pop sites as well as hosting services across the Internet because lets just be honest here: the majority of the material that we consume as international K-pop fans leads — in one way or another — to a violation of copyright claims.

This network relay of virtual information is largely due to the voluntary efforts led by fans along every step of the process: from the uploaders, to teams of dedicated subbers, to distributors who share and relay the upload links through forums and other websites, to those of us who are the final consumers of the product, who may not commit any action other than simply clicking a play button on a site. Every single participant along this chain of actions is guilty.

However, we also have to consider that what is particularly unique about the spread of K-pop is that it is largely as the result of all this activity — all of this questionably illegal activity, might I add — that has gotten their precious Hallyu to where it is today.

Can you imagine what K-pop would be like if the only videos you had access to were those uploaded to the official YouTube or Facebook accounts of companies? Or if we had virtually no access to any variety show footage (it seems highly unlikely that they would be uploaded — much less subbed)? Or if we actually had to buy hard copy DVD sets of dramas and movies in order to watch them (again, most likely without subtitles)? It certainly wouldn’t be the K-pop as you know it today, we wouldn’t know our beloved idols on as intimate a basis as we think we do, and we ourselves would be very different consumers (after all, we can only consume what we have access to) as well.

The bigger question is: Would it be in the best interests of K-pop to enact this type of hyper-regulation?

The push to protect copyrighted material in itself is a noble and worthy cause, but the mode of execution is another matter altogether. I actually think that the issue can be addressed simply by looking at the supply and demand. People pirate material because there is less supply (either in content quality, or in format quantity) than there is demand. The most effective answer to this problem shouldn’t be to solely focus on wiping out the symptom (pirating), but also to address the source. Why are people pirating? Have their needs changed and developed alongside the ever-changing and ever-developing technologies? Can it be that perhaps people are finding ways to circumvent a system that is simply archaic and cumbersome to their needs? Perhaps the current system needs to be redesigned or overhauled?

And would the potential monetary gain (by defending copyright claims) be able to make up for the subsequent loss of international fan attention? I wouldn’t be too sure about that…