ARCHIVAL INSTITUTIONS AND COPYRIGHT IN KOREA - DOI: 10.12818/P.0304-2340.2023v83p219

Abstract

Archiving copyrighted materials is often mandated to preserve them for years to come, and especially when handling digital materials created in formats, or housed on media, that are likely to become obsolete. The predominant parts of the archives are unpublished works. In order for archiving institutions to gather, house and preserve mass collection of copyrighted resources, they need to be wise enough to comply with copyright law. The copyright law issues surrounding archiving institutions have arisen out of disputes over the relationship among authors, archiving institutions, and users of archives. The Korean copyright law has already had first sale doctrine, limitation to copyright protection for reproduction and/or public transmission of libraries, etc. temporary copying exception, fair use exception, exploitation of cultural facilities exception, and database right. On the other hand, it lacks PLR scheme, ECL system, and text and data mining exception. In terms of ECL system and text and data mining exception, a bill on the Korean Copyright Act was submitted to the Korean National Assembly in order to newly insert ECL in 2021. Especially, revision of the Korean Copyright Act needs to be made to introduce text and data mining exception because the fair use doctrine has not been used by the Korean courts so far and because collected data are commonly used to train models to generate similar archives by using AI technology. In addition, archiving institutions need to take into account moral rights of authors in archiving copyrighted materials.