Legal Environment

Summary

The government enacted the Basic Act for Promoting Information in 1996 to embrace information age and afterwards enacted "The Basic Act for Electronic Commerce" and "The Digital Signature Act" in order to promote the e-commerce industry. Seven expert meetings were held from 1995 to 2000, organized by KISDI to develop laws that will promote information technology.

Experts from the academia and business sector, and government regulators participated in the expert meetings. Studies on e-commerce, digital government services, remote computing, and a structural framework for establishing a strong information technology foundation have been carried out in the expert meetings

Also, a systematic review of laws and new bills for promoting the information technology industry were discussed. Among 6 cases, 47 issues were studied since May 1995, and as of December 2000, 136 laws have been newly enacted or revised.

The government will continuously review previous laws and enact new ones. The government will take into consideration to the various opinions from ministries, legislative body, academia, and business sector.  The following table shows many of the IT laws that were passed.

• International Ecommerce Cooperation

The Korean government is presently developing a long-term policy initiative to promote its nation's ecommerce and Internet networks. As part of this objective, Korea has decided to cooperate with other Asian nations in setting up an Internet trade network linking Korea, Japan, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other nations.

• Enforcement

Korea's intellectual property protection regime is rigid, but enforcement has been moderate.  However, government authorities are now beginning to more rigid enforcement on intellectual property violations in an effort to develop software industry and avoid trade pressure from the U.S. and other industrialized countries.

• Piracy

Following is the piracy rates from the piracy study conducted by Business Software Alliance (BSA).

1995	1996	1997	1998	1999	2000
76%	70%	67%	64%	50%	56%

It is showing the downward trend. However, it is still way too high compared to the developed nations such as the US and UK at 24% and 26%, respectively, in year 2000 [3]. This is the main reason why the software industry in Korea never developed.

Indeed, the following table shows the estimated retail software revenues lost due piracy in Korea from BSA.

1995	1996	1997	1998	1999	2000
$675,281	$515,547	$582,320	$197,516	$197,269	$302,938

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