91% of News Sites Borrow from Papers

It turns out that nine out of 10 websites providing news have plagiarized articles from newspapers without any permission.

Grand National Party lawmaker Park Hyung-Jun, a member of the Culture and Tourism Committee in the National Assembly, released a report under the name “Investigating the actual conditions of digital news infringement of copyrights.” According to the report, it is found out that 760 out of 831 websites providing news services published articles without any prior consent or contract with news agencies.

The Korean Press Foundation surveyed 2,984 popular Internet websites from mid-March for a month about the severity of the copyrights infringement of the 83 news agencies nationwide, including 65 newspaper companies which supply their content on the web as well.

Among the types of infringement, 79.8% of the Internet websites were pirating the whole article and 12.6% were using ‘direct link’ methods, in which only the title or just part of the contents is plagiarized. By clicking on the contents, the original newspaper article will pop up. Ministry of Culture ruled against ‘direct link’ methods and stated it is illegal to copy articles without any permission or agreement with the news agencies or without any proper compensation.

Yonhap news, with 30,712 articles, was found out to have been plagiarized mostly. Newsen (entertainment news website with 11,662 articles), Dong-A Ilbo (11,268 articles), Hankyung (1,211), Moneytoday (9,114) and Chosun Ilbo (8,948) were following behind. Under the agreement by the Copyright Compensation Council, this report assessed the value of each article as 46,875 won and stated that the economic damage of the copyrights reaches up to around 16 billion won. Lawmaker Park said, “New contents which are the main product and asset of the newspaper agencies are plagiarized but it is difficult to control the pirates individually. It is urgent to take measures to buildup models that generate profits through news contents and establish normal orders in the circulation.”

mindy@donga.com