A Seoul court ruled Tuesday that the producers of a music video for K-pop singer Ivy pay compensation to a Japanese animated film maker for plagiarizing the Japanese producer's popular film Final Fantasy VII.
The Seoul Central District Court noted that Japanese copyrights should be treated equally to domestic ones in South Korea according to an international copyright treaty.
Japanese popular game maker Square Enix filed civil and criminal suits in March last year against Ivy's 2007 music video, titled "Sonata of Temptation," claiming that the video copied its 2005 sequel to the popular Final Fantasy VII franchise, "Final Fantasy VII Advent Children."
In the criminal case, the Seoul court upheld the claim made by Square Enix in December and imposed penalties of 100 million won (US$101,000) on Ivy's agency Fantom Entertainment Group and 60 million won on the music video director, Hong Jong-ho.
The ruling was echoed in the civil court, which ordered Fantom and the music video director, Hong Jong-ho, pay a total of 600 million won ($606,000) to the Japanese game maker.
"Except for the one difference that Final Fantasy VII is a computer-animated film and Sonata of Temptation is a video of a real human acting, their plots, developments, backgrounds and the looks and attire of the characters appear to be almost identical," Judge Lee Gyun-ryong said.
The judge noted that South Korea and Japan are both members of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, ordering each defendant pay Square Enix a 300 million won fine.
Ivy, whose real name is Park Eun-hye, has suffered a series of scandals in recent months that seriously threatened her rise as a sexy new icon. A rumor spread that a sex video tape of her existed after her ex-boyfriend claimed that he shot the video with her. Ivy denied she ever made the tape, and the boyfriend was indicted for blackmail in November.
But then, a cosmetics firm that had hired her as its commercial model filed a 500 million won damage suit against the singer, saying her "inappropriate" private life damaged its brand image.
