On February 10, Seoul Central District Court ruled that Jin-Young Park, one of the most influential music producer and composer, had plagiarized another Korean composer’s song. The defendant Mr. Park is well-known as the co-owner of JYP Entertainment, one of the top Korean music production company(Gi-Huek-Sa). He had produced numerous albums for famous K-Pop artists including, but not limited to, Rain, G.O.D, Wonder Girls.
The plaintiff Shin-Il Kim, a K-Pop composer, had filed a lawsuit against Jin-Young Park on July 2011, claiming Mr. Park’s song titled “Someday”, sung by IU, had infringed his song titled “To My Man” and he is entitled to a compensation of approximately 90,000USD.
The Court found that four bars from the chorus of defendant’s song is substantially similar to that of plaintiff’s song which constitutes a copyright infringement and ordered the defendant to pay approximately 20,000USD to the plaintiff as a remedy.
Under Korean copyright law, a claim for plagiarism and copyright infringement will lie when the defendant had an access to the copyrighted work of plaintiff and there exists a substantial similarity between the two works. With regard to the first element, Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by chungwi 
A few days ago, Seoul Central Court ruled in favor of Starbucks Korea in a copyright lawsuit filed by the Korea Music Copyright Association alleging the Starbucks Korea should pay royalties in playing copyrighted music in its outlets. I wrote some posts regarding this issue 
