P2P Industry Frowns as Court Bans Its Service
By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter
The online file sharing service is fluctuating between hope and fear as a local court ordered the nation's No. 1 peer-to-peer (P2P) company to cease services Thursday.
The company argued that such an order could harm the user created content (UCC) market, which is expected to boom in three-to-four years.
Seoul High Court ordered Soribada to shut down its servers that provide connections between users' computer hard drives to download content, which includs music, audio files and some texts. The order is expected to affect other P2P service companies, too.
Earlier, recording company JYP, singer Han Dae-soo and 30 others applied for a provisional disposition against Soribada saying it infringed upon copyrights and asked the court to place sanctions on the company's file copying service.
The P2P company said it will once again improve its file-screening system to avoid the business sanction. The new service will only allow the exchange of files that are allowed by copyright owners.
However, the company argued that the court order had not taken UCC into consideration. The company has been focusing on a new type of UCC P2P service, and said sanctions could hinder the development of the next upgrade. UCC is widely used to share knowledge or ideas and in many cases copyright is unclear.
``The aggressive screening of UCC content will clean up the whole Internet-based service industry,'' a Soribada spokesperson told the Kukmin Ilbo newspaper.
He said the dispute between the music industry and P2P services could determine whether online companies and UCC will survive.
``If you apply the law elsewhere, nearly all portal sites or large Web sites such as Youtube.com, which provide all kinds of UCC, may have to shut down, too,'' he added.
According to the order, Soribada may have to pay a fine of one-to-two million won a day should it be caught providing downloading connections of content without the copyright owner's consent.
Soribada was established in 2000 and became a listed company in 2003. In 2002 a court ruled that its service could violate music copyright, but the company developed a filtering system where singers who wish to ban the free distribution of their music can block the connection.
On Friday, a day after the court ruling, the stock price of the company almost halved, from 6,560 won to 3,655 won per share.