콘텐츠 산업에서의 저작권 —최근 1년간의 관련 판례들을 중심으로—

In this article, the cases for last one year related to copyright issues of the Korea's contents industry are overviewed. Almost these cases are no more than lower court decisions because of the intrinsic nature of the contents copyright that it is usually more vulnerable to infringement and consequently yields less compensation for a creator when compared to patents. These decisions clarified that the key criteria for copyright protection of arguably original contents should be whether others could work without the same or similar expression to that of the original creator's work. Also, in establishing the legal requirements of content copyright infringement, the rulings are affected by the U.S law in many aspect. However, some positions in the recent cases are unreasonable on the point as follows: Korean courts in recent cases still insist on their past contradictory position about the copyright protection eligibility of typeface itself and font software. The courts arguably take a negative attitude to develop more suitable legal theories over the new internet environment when they tried to solve some copyright disputes in online contents. When interpreting the legal effect of copyright trust agreement, a court didn't appropriately consider the distinct feature of copyright. Even so, under the rapid transition of copyright ecosystem in which the Korea's attitude have changed from a passive posture of the past to a rather aggressive position for copyright protection of the contents related to so-called Korean Culture Wave and the internet technology continuously evolved, the recent court judgments as a whole should be appraised as a faithful contributor to hitting the right balance which is required by Article 1, Korean Copyright Act.