IP & Art

The Copyright Act of Korea provides as follows.

Article 1 provides the purpose of this Act, which provides that 

  "the purpose of this Act is to protect the rights of authors and the rights neighboring on them and to promote fair use of works in order to contribute to the improvement and development of culture and related industries.  

  As explained in this provision, the basic purpose of this Act to promote creative work through protecting author's right for a certain period of time and then putting them into the public domain. This purpose will be almost same all over the world.

Aricle 2 provides various legal definitions of words which were written in this Act in details.  

1. The term “work” means a creative production that expresses human thoughts and emotions;

  Here, the word " work" means " the work protected by this Act". Therefore, the issues will come out about if the work of AI will fall into the categories protected by this Act. Its literal interprestation appears that the AI' work will not be protected by this Act. And therefore, this provision should be revised to accommodate needs for purpose of protecting the AI's works as any other countries' ones.

2. The term “author” means a person who creates a work;

  Here, the author means a copyrightholder. There are various type of copyrightholders, and we will see it in more details shortly.