개인정보 보호와 공유자원 관리

This research examines the nature of personal information and its design principles in cyberspace. In so doing, it, first, compares personal information as a private and individual property or goods with one as a common goods. Second, this paper explores the relationship between design principles of common-pool resources and property rights most relevant for the use of common-pool resources. Third, it discusses the types of infringement of personal information under the Encouragement of the Use of Communication Networks and the Securement of Personal Information Act of 2001 in a close connection to the design principles of common-pool resource systems and the property rights relevant for the use of common-pool resources. As more and more surveillance technologies are adopted into various fields of our everyday social life, our personal information and privacy are more and more becoming vulneralbe to eyes of multiple surveillant agencies including Internet community portals. Yet peoples’ interests in protecting their personal information are paradoxically loosing momentum. Given that, we may need to employ, instead of considering personal information as a pure private and individual property, a viewpoint that regards personal information as a common goods. To some extent, the law mentioned above can be interpreted as an effort to prescribe the scope and the limit of property rights that member-based industries such as Internet community portals may use personal information of members they collected in their sites. Although the Act of 2001 legally supports the effort to protect personal information as a common goods and the Internet as a common-pools resource system from seriously violated and destroyed, there have still been reported many cases of infringement of personal information regarding it as a pure personal and private property at the owner’s disposal.