By Kim Tong-hyung
Despite an open and vocal commitment to combat cyber piracy, it appears that the government is continuing to be exposed for its ineptitude in weeding out pirated computer software, movies and games.
Although the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and other related government agencies are promising to strengthen their monitoring of illegal downloads, they could do worse than to look in the mirror as public servants are found to be among the biggest customers for the unauthorized copies.
According to figures from the Korea Copyright Commission, public organizations were cited more than 2,600 times through August this year for using pirated software. The violations are on course to exceed 3,000 by the end of the year, representing a dramatic increase from around 700 cases in 2008 and 1,900 last year, although the inflated numbers have much to do with the increased number of regional government organizations put under watch.
Predictably, the use of pirated software was found to be more frequent among provincial agencies than central government units, apparently a result of the lax control in past years.
The violations among special regional administrative agencies, which hadn’t been screened for software piracy until this year, reached 959 through the Jan.-Aug. period, which was about three times more than the 336 cases reported from central government agencies.
Regionally-based state-run enterprises were tagged 593 times for illegal software use through August, significantly higher than the 149 violations throughout last year.
``The widespread use of pirated computer software among public organizations was found to be at shocking levels,’’ said Lee Yong-kyung, the former chief executive of telecommunications giant KT and now a lawmaker of the Creative Korea Party.
``The culture ministry needs to be stricter in monitoring the use of pirated software among public organizations, which is crucial for helping the country’s devastated software industry that is currently on life support.’’
The ministry helms the policies related to the protection of intellectual property, and took over the duty of monitoring cyber piracy from the Ministry of Information and Communication, which was absorbed by the Korea Communication Commission (KCC) at the start of the Lee Myung-bak government.
Although the communication ministry had focused on detecting pirated computer software and games, the culture ministry now also looks for for illegally copied music, movies and printed material.
The latter has been failing to show the required commitment to match its increased responsibility, Lee claimed. The communication ministry had operated a 60-man team to monitor software piracy back in 2005, but the culture ministry has now assigned just over 30 employees to screen for illegal downloads, Lee said.
``About 41 percent of software used in Korea was founded to be pirated last year, which is an improvement from the 43 percent in 2008. However, the losses from software piracy remained consistently high at $570 million last year, basically at the same level of 2008,’’ Lee said.