Media Groups Warn Portals on Contract Breach

Internet media and contents groups are questioning the Internet portals’ distribution of news content.

The portals have already been criticized for violating the contract when they included news contents in their search database even after the contract for distributing news content expired.

Six organizations, including Korea Online Journalist Association, Korea Online Newspaper Association, Korea Internet Journalist Association, Korea Internet Media Association, Korea Internet Newspaper Association, and Korea Internet Contents Association, held an inauguration meeting of the News Contents Copyright Holders’ Council on Tuesday in Seoul. The council demanded Internet portals to delete news contents with distribution contracts that have already expired.

The council said that while most media agencies make six-month contracts with Naver, it allows users search for news from as early as the late 1990s and declared that this is a breach of contract.

It added that portals should not save news contents on their database to include in their search engines. It called for portals to delete the contents when the contracts expire and to sign another contract to continue using the contents.

“We have requested that Naver delete articles from Chosun.com and Hankyung.com that were included in expired contracts,” said president Han Ki-bong of Korea Online Newspaper Association. “The media companies will act as a group if Naver does not accept our request by the middle of this month.”

He continued, “We will allow users to access news articles that are more than a week old at the homepages of the news media companies. We will disable searching for articles in portals.”

The council also requested portals to stop modifying and editing news contents, and allow users to distribute news articles without permission by scrapping and sending articles to blogs and email addresses.

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