Open Net, Past 7 Years, Present and Future
November 2019
*This is a working document that will be updated every year.
Present
Open Net believes in “scaling the movement” as in “scaling the business.” We believe the Internet brought new scales to progressive movements for liberty and equality, and believe that such scalability requires a strong Internet ecosystem with reliable and diverse platforms where users’ rights are well protected and platforms well governed.
What we said in 2017 that “Open Net is unique among civil society in its emphasis on digital economy and Internet freedom as shown in its work on government-issued electronic certificates, identity verification, intermediary liability, etc., which have threatened the growth of Internet start-ups in Korea. In 2017, it will start working on big data, data anonymization, RTBF, smartphone appstore governance, etc.”
Open Net fought vigorously on the right to be forgotten both at international and domestic fora. In 2016, Open Net successfully organized a push-back against legislative/regulatory attempts to institute RTBF. In 2018-9, Open Net also participated in international coalition on Google v. CNIL stopping a global delisting order. Open Net also successfully lobbied against new intermediary liability laws. Open Net has researched on our entry point into inclusive big data and will move onto the stage soon late 2019 or 2020 using its already visible roles in inclusive artificial intelligence.
What we said in 2017: Open Net has been at the forefront of net neutrality as well, successfully stopping mVoIP throttling by SKT and KT through litigation efforts, but it will start working on insider zero rating where the telcos zero-rate exclusively their own or affiliate contents. Also, Open Net will play a key role in moderating the disputes over paid peering [sic], a looming issue in Korea as more OTTs here become bigger.
What is more important, since 2018, Open Net has led fight against any erosion of network neutrality in Korea ranging from 5G network slicing, vertically integrated zero rating, and the sending party network pays rule, which are poised to affect grievously the Internet intermediaries. Early 2019, SKT succumbed under the pressure and actually discontinued its insider zero rating.
What we said in 2017: Born of the optimism post the successful constitutional challenge against Korea’s Internet real name law, continues to lead the fights against the laws restricting anonymity, a crucial such as adult material real-name law, internet game real-name law, warrantless access to user identities, and will expand into the SIM card registration, etc.
We recently lost the constitutional challenge against the mandatory SIM card registration but at least established the anonymous right to one-to-one telecommunication as a future springboard here for anonymity. We continue to push back against repeated attempts by politicians to reintroduce anonymity restrictions at various levels, which will dampen people’s ability to exercise free speech at larger scales.
What we said in 2017: Open Net will continue to excel in broadening free speech for the netizens in the areas of copyright and defamation, as shown in the two important text-book cases of fair use, one bit Torrent case, and one important government officials defamation case. In addition, Open Net will pick up on substantive issues such as truth defamation, insult law, electoral defamation/insult law, e etc., which have branded much content online as dangerous and therefore provided much impetus for pro-regulatory environment.
Open Net has been active on offline human rights issues as offline laws affect online laws and regulatory trends. For instance, excessive criminal defamation and insult laws shape the outer boundaries of online restrictions. We believe we successfully turned the tides and organized a majority political will to abolish truth defamation law, organizing a legal academics’ petition drive for the abolition in 2018. Also, we spoke against attempts to legislate fake news laws both as criminal sanctions on users as well as intermediaries.
What we said in 2017: Open Net has also stoutly defended free speech from the worrying trends in administrative censorship and intermediary liability as shown in its success in blocking the passage of two different government-sponsored bills one by Korean Communication Commission and one by Korean Press Arbitration Board. Open Net believes that it has built sufficient relationship with legislators at least to block a barrage of attempts to impose greater monitoring obligations and other intermediary obligations on platform providers such as Afreeca TV, YouTube, etc.
Open Net has indeed issued numerous statements and spoke at numerous venues against the incumbents’ legislations to introduce new OTT regulations including television-level content regulation, data localization, etc. The most promising data localization bill of 2018 was quickly discredited into obscurity after Open Net convened a well-attended seminar with U.S. Embassy.
What we said in 2017: Open Net’s leadership in open data movement is shining in 2016 and it is chairing the Korean civil society coalition on both the national Open Government Partnership and the Seoul City’s subnational OGP. It will continue to lobby the government for opening up more government data for the individuals and businesses to use toward a more enriched data eco-system.
Open Net has continued to fight for better availability of judgment databases which affect growth of civic technologies enabling open democracy. In 2019, the Korean Supreme Court heeded our recommendations and created one-stop search engine for all 85 courts’ formerly separate databases and opened criminal judgments for keyword searches. Open Net continued its Open Net has continued in its leadership in Open Government Partnership’s Civil Society sector.
Open Net’s visibility at international fora continues at Global Network Initiative, Freedom Online Coalition, IGF, and Rightscon, etc. at the same scale, resulting in good relationship with such entities such as UN Human Special Rapporteurs, BEREC officers, who have strengthened our local work with their visits. Open Net joined and led the Korean NGO coalition for the preparation of the UN Special Rapporteur on Privacy Joe Cannataci’s visit, although many issues were offline issues. Open Net’s whole day seminar with UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression David Kaye also was effective in revitalizing and recapitulating critical free speech issues such as punishment of online opinion rigging, child pornography, etc.
Looking Ahead
Open Net should strengthen its effort on raising awareness and educating the general public and need to increase interaction with Internet users. Open Net is well known to related government ministries, the industry, media, and experts, and its opinions are well regarded. However, it seems that the public often finds our position and reasoning complicated and difficult to understand. We should carry out more campaigns that touch the hearts of normal Internet users.
In order to strengthen our grassroots basis and in particular increase individual membership, we have reopened Open Net Academy in October 2018, a night school for people interested in learning about free speech, privacy, net neutrality, and other issues that Open Net works on. This year, we opened it under the title “Internet and Feminism” for feminism became ever-growing in importance as contextualizing factors in crafting free speech and privacy discussions. We are planning to hold it more often in 2020.
We will add more nuances in one way and radicalize in another way our work on freedom of speech in the feminist angles. For instance, we will work with a feminist online platform on defending intermediary liability safe harbor while educating the public on the value of minority groups’ free speech as shown by that platform’s “mirroring” strategy.
In order to both strengthen our exposure to grassroots civil society and feminist discourses, we hired a new part-time researcher and advocacy coordinator who, in her another part-time commitment, is leading a coalition of arts and cultural industry workers and has published on feminist issues.
Also, in order to strengthen our cooperation and exchange with overseas organizations and scholars, we hired a new full-time lawyer with excellent communication and research skills in English. We have already obtained positive feedback results and feedback on our work on the emerging threats to network neutrality, and will further strengthen our ability to commandeer high-level academic/policy interventions from overseas to break the deadlock on the relevant issues. The new lawyer has been instrumental in setting up and organizing an international seminar on platform economies and economic inequalities.
Past
[2013-2014]
April 24: Successfully lobbied past the relevant parliamentary committee a Copyright Act amendment narrowing the scope of criminal provisions to infringements of KRW 1,000,000 or more in damages.
September 2: Won the appeal in the lawsuit seeking damages for the government’s blocking of a website parodying the government’s banking app store not consonant with open payment standards long advocated for by Open Net.
September 26: Won free speech for video artists at the Supreme Court, which held that pornography featuring adults wearing school uniforms does not constitute “child pornography”.
September 30: Successfully passed through the National Assembly an Electronic Financial Transactions Act amendment allowing online payments not using government-sponsored electronic certificates.
November 24: Received KISA award for promoting public interest in 9th Korea Internet Award hosted by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning.
December 2014: Won a not-guilty judgment upon a theory of fair use in a criminal copyright infringement case, relating the use of a picture of a CAD designer’s desk on a non-profit, women’s movement organization’s blogpost about the working conditions in industrial design industry.
[2015]
January 2015 through present: Successfully blocked a Korean Communication Commission’s bill to amend the Information and Communication Network Act’s intermediary liability provisions, which would have further tightened Internet intermediary’s obligations to take down lawful contents and “stay them down” even upon legitimate restoration request.
January 2015: Won a not-guilty judgment on Hong Ga-Hye, who had been indicted and arrested for about 100 days for criminal defamation when she criticized the Coast Guard’s rescue efforts during the Sewol Ferry sinking on television.
May 2015: Successfully defended upon a theory of fair use a civil copyright infringement claim relating to the use of a picture of halibut sashimi on a non-profit, peace movement organization’s blogpost recommending vegetarian diet.
May 28: Held an international seminar on intermediary liability with overseas experts in the laws of U.S., EU, Japan, and Australia, against which Korea’s “mandatory” notice-and-takedown rules and general monitoring obligations for obscenity, copyright infringement, and child pornography were compared, which provided the theoretical platform for future legislative changes. A bill to amend the Copyright Act was introduced in October to make clear that the Internet intermediaries are not obliged to take down allegedly copyright infringing material upon notice from copyright holders.
July 2015: Jointly developed and distributed Open Vaccine, a smartphone app designed to detect the traces of Remote Control System, a spyware developed by the Italian Hacking Team and purchased by the National Intelligence Service, and highly suspected of being used for surveillance on Korean citizens. Open Vaccine was downloaded by more than 50K people in Korea and the English version was released in November at Google Play.
November 1: Worked with Citizen Lab, Open Technology Foundation (Radio Free Asia), and Cure53 to conduct and publish a security audit of Smart Sheriff, a parental monitoring and control app promoted by the government as fulfilling a statutory requirement of harmful contents filtering measure, installed in more than 500K smartphones used by Korean youths, which ultimately resulted in the voluntary shut-down of the Smart Sheriff services by its government-sponsored vendor.
November 5: Successfully lobbied on-site in Geneva for a UN Human Rights Committee’s recommendation on the Republic of Korea that she abolish Article 83(3) of the Telecommunications Business Act authorizing warrantless seizure of communications service subscribers’ identification data, affecting more than 10 million accounts each year.
[2016]
March – Present: Open Net has spearheaded organizing the Korean civil society coalition for Open Government Partnership,. Major contribution includes participating in constructing government’s National Action Plan, and monitoring its moves toward the Plan and the principles of Open Government Partnership.
March 30 – April 01: At RightsCon 2016 conference in San Francisco Open Net hosted a session on warrantless access to subscriber data in which UN Special Rapporteur on FoE David Kaye spoke, and spoke in various sessions on right to be forgotten, intermediary liability, Internet transparency, and net neutrality. Other achievements included working with Article 19 on the principles of balancing free speech vs. privacy, and building international network of public interests attorneys with Media Legal Defence Initiative.
April 01: Open Net won a civil suit against a copyright troll’s excessive damage claims to BitTorrent users who had downloaded stories from published books. The court decided that to harass the accused by filing rampant lawsuits solely for monetary settlement is illegal because it is not in accordance with the nature of civil actions.
May 27: Open Net celebrated the third anniversary by hosting a special conference, “Free, Open, and Sharing Internet,” in which various Internet freedom and digital economy issues were discussed in three independent sessions. Combined annual reports titled “Activity Report 2013 – 2015” was released.
June 01: On behalf of 22 users participated in Open Net’s “Ask Your Telcos” campaign, Open Net filed a civil damages suit against the National Intelligence Service and investigative authorities for unlawful warrantless seizure of subscriber data.
June 15: Open Net released a new report on the social responsibilities of the Internet intermediaries, “Stand Up for Digital Rights: Recommendations for Responsible Tech,” after jointly working with Center for Law and Democracy (Canada), Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (Egypt), Center for Internet and Society (India), Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information (Argentina), Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (Canada), and research team of University of Toronto (Canada).
August 30: Open Net represented minors and their parents in a constitutional challenge against the law that forces to adopt measures blocking “harmful contents” in smartphone owned by minors.
September 23: Open Net hosted in the Korea Internet Governance Forum (KrIGF) annual conference three sessions on regulation: webcasting regulation, zero-rating, and the mandatory ISMS certification. Open Net also presented various local and global Internet governance issues in KrIGF Steering Committee, and conducted a training on United Nations’ human rights mechanism related to those issues.
September 24: Access Now, an international NGO working for open Internet, selected Open Net as one of the “heroes” that are most working for human rights in communications surveillance in 2016. Open Net was specifically recognized for its efforts to reveal the risks of Smart Sheriff, a parental monitoring app supported by the government, and to finally shut it down.
[2017]
February 24: Sponsored a bill to make publicly available a searchable database of all court decisions in Korea, together with Representative Keum Tae-sup.
May 2017: Conducted an audit of Kakao and Samsung as part of Ranking Digital Rights, an international effort to evaluate ICT companies under 2017 Corporate Accountability Index.
June 8: Successfully defended several “insult” lawsuits filed by a powerful attorney-former legislator who was criticized for his adultery.
July 3: Successfully defended a copyright infringement lawsuit against embedded video clips, setting the precedent.
August 24: Elected Civil Society Member in Korea’s Open Government Partnership Multistakeholder Forum.
October 18: Finalized the winning judgment to remove KCSC’s order to shut down www.northkoreatech.org for reasons of the infamous National Security Act.
November 1: Filed a constitutional challenge against mandatory SIM card registration law, which has suppressed people’s right to communicate anonymously.
November 27: Published, in coalition with Citizen Lab and Cure 53, a security audit report on the parental child monitoring apps distributed by KT and LGU+.
December 1: Filed a constitutional challenge against the crime of “insult”, which has suppressed freedom of speech.
[2018]
February 12: Open Net co-hosted the seminar “Artificial Intelligence (AI), Threat or Opportunity?” with the Economic Democracy Forum of the National Assembly (Co-Chairperson LEE Jongkul and YOO Seunghee), the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT), and the Economist at the National Assembly.
February 22: Open Net co-hosted “Disclosure of Court Decisions for Transparent Judicial Procedure” with MP MIN Byungdoo and KEUM Taesup.
February 23: Open Net was appointed as a member of the “Internet Mutual Sustainability Council” of the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) where Open Net debunk the theories of “network usage fees” and “reverse discrimination” between local and global companies.
March 5: Open Net co-hosted a seminar on “Copyright Act Reform for the Protection of Creative Labour” with MP NOH Woongrae and JO Baesook.
April 5: Open Net held a press conference for “the Declaration of 330 Lawyers for the Abolition of Truth Defamation.” The lawyers condemned Article 307 ① and 309 ① of the Criminal Act and Article 70 ① of the Information and Communications Network Act as unconstitutional and demanded the politicians to enact the amendments abolishing truth defamation as soon as possible.
May 15: Open Net co-hosted a talk with two Internet Hall of Fame winners, Vice President for Google Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet, and Dr. Kilnam Chon, the father of the Korean Internet. The Title was “the Present and the Future of the Internet” and discussed issues such as blockchain, net neutrality, 5G, privacy, fake news, and AI.
May 16-18: Open Net attended the largest international digital rights conference RightsCon 2018 held in Toronto, Canada. KS Park spoke at multiple sessions including “Is Multistakeholder Internet Governance Advancing, Dying, or Evolving?” and “Online Anonymity: Key Lessons & Emerging Threats.” Kelly Kim was on the panel about access rights, “Access My Info: Exposing disconnects between data protection in theory and in practice” organized by the Citizen Lab at Toronto University.
June 1: Open Net’s Attorney Jiwon Son was appointed as a member of the Special Advisory Committee to the Korea Communications Standard Commission (KCSC), in which she will advise KCSC on important content takedown/blocking actions taken by the internet censorship body.
June 4: Open Net hosted “the Future of the Internet ecosystem” conference to commemorate its 5th anniversary. The program had a panel discussion on the regulations on Internet portals including ‘fake news’ and ‘comment manipulation’ issues, a speech on ‘digital capitalism and basic income,’ and a presentation on Open Net’s significant achievements in the last 5 years.
July 5: Open Net co-hosts and is on the Program Committee of the ‘Korea Internet Governance Forum (KrIGF),’ where Open Net hosted a workshop on net neutrality and Internet interconnection and participated in the “Freedom of Expression and Hate Speech” session.
September 7: Open Net co-hosted a seminar on net neutrality “Where is Net Neutrality Going in the 5G era” with MP Jongkul Lee at the National Assembly, where Legislative Counsel Ernesto Falcon of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) was invited to give a presentation on the recent trend in the net neutrality debate in the US.
September 10: Open Net was appointed as a member of the ‘5G Communication Policy Council’ under the Ministry of Science and ICT, where Open Net will advocate for defending and strengthening network neutrality against the telcos’ proposal for ‘network slicing’ and enforcing the norm on the ongoing, vertically integrated zero rating deals.
October 8: Open Net has been actively advocating for open data including court decisions. In February 2017, MP KEUM Taesup, with the support of Open Net, proposed an amendment to the Civil Procedure Act and an amendment to the Criminal Procedure Act that would enable full disclosure of court decisions. The Supreme Court recently announced that it would start building a comprehensive judgment search system (Oct. 8), now including criminal judgments.
November 5: Open Net co-hosted “Fake News and False Information, Threats to the Freedom of Expression” seminar with MP Hyesun Choo and a progressive news media, Media Onul at the National Assembly. Open Net advocate for the importance of people’s right to information albeit inaccurate and a public sphere of discourse where people can exchange ideas and beliefs without risking criminal prosecution and suggested alternatives to maintaining the health of that public sphere.
November 5-6: Open Net organized two workshops at the 2018 OGP Asia-Pacific Regional Meeting held in Seoul. At “Creative Responses to Shrinking Civic Spaces” workshop, Open Net discussed fake news regulation, defamation law, and intermediary liability law. At “Spotlight on Innovations: New Frontiers of Open Government” Workshop, Open Net talked about how artificial intelligence and disclosure of judgments can contribute to judicial oversight.
November 28: Open Net co-hosted seminar “Borderless Internet and Digital Sovereignty” with the U.S. Embassy in Korea to discuss the problems with the server localization bill proposed by MP Jaeil Byun that requires IT companies to locate a server in Korea and another current regulation threatening network neutrality, namely Sending Party Network Pays, which forces the otherwise peering networks to pay for the traffic they send to other networks and thereby incentivizes them to recoup those expenses from their client content providers by either charging usage-based pricing or higher transit fees.
November 30: Open Net co-hosted a seminar “Financial Cloud Regulation Mitigation and Digital Policy Outlook” with the Korea Internet Business Association.
December 4: Open Net General Counsel Kelly Kim won the lawsuit for the disclosure of her personal information against KT. The lawsuit was filed because KT denied full access to a user’s personal information they have collected. The trial court decided that telecoms should disclose all personal information to users including incoming call logs.
[2019]
January- June: Open Net submitted an opinion on a bill imposing monitoring and takedown obligation on online service providers for defamatory contents, submitted an opinion on a bill imposing monitoring and takedown obligation on special types of online service providers (i.e., “web-hard” or cyberlockers) for illegal videos, an opinion on the Broadcasting Act bill regarding OTT regulation, an opinion on a bill making it mandatory for messenger service providers to register as a value-added communications business, an opinion opposing Representative Ha Taekeung’s proposed amendments to the ‘Information and Communications Network Act’ that allows the website to be shut down should insulting or hate-filled posts take up more than 20% of the posts, an opinion to opposing amendments to the Press Arbitration Act that enables the blocking of access to Internet news articles when requested by a harmed party, all the National Assembly; and also a statement criticizing the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) and the Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC) for adopting Server Name Indication (SNI) fields filtering technology to block illegal websites.
February 13: Open Net invited Frode Sorensen, the main author of BEREC net neutrality guideline to hold a seminar to learn from the EU on 5G and network slicing.
February 26: “Bad Fathers” is a website posing a list of parents who are not paying child support ordered by the court. Prior to the KCSC’s deliberation on the blocking of the website for privacy issues, Open Net released a commentary that the website should not be taken down as it contributes to the public interest. The KCSC decided not to take down “Bad Fathers,” andOpen Net welcomed the decision and asked the KCSC to be more conscious of freedom of expression in its deliberation.
March 4: Open Net held a press conference for Martyn Williams, a British reporter and the operator of northkoreatech.org, a website covering North Korea’s ICT issues, which was unblocked through an Open Net lawsuit.
March- October: Open Net submitted an opinion supporting a bill restricting the scope of the crime of truth defamation, and opposing a bill of the Special Act on the May 18 Democratization Movement that punishes a person who spreads ‘falsehood’ about the Movement, submitted an opinion to the National Assembly opposing Representative Park Wansu’s proposed bill that calls for aggravated punishment of cyber insult, an opinion to the National Assembly opposing a bill on the Criminal Act that creates the crime of insult of the deceased, an opinion to the National Assembly opposing a bill on the Criminal Act that bans the non-sensual recording of conversations, released a statement urging the prosecution to stop its investigation on a middle school teacher who showed the radical feminist film ‘Oppressed Majority’, called for an end to criminal threat investigations on a social media post proposing to “kill” President Moon, as it is essentially a revival of old “Insult to Head of State” laws, condemned a criminal judgement on a Korean hip hop artist Black Nut for allegedly sexually harassing lyrics against a fellow rapper, put out a public statement urging the Justice Minister Cho Kuk to halt criminal prosecution of a senior citizen he has personally filed a criminal complaint against, and published a public statement demanding that Chief Prosecutor drop its criminal complaint against Hankyoreh newspaper.
April 22: Open Net and PSPD (People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy) jointly held a press meeting of two international experts on freedom of expression to discuss the recent controversies around the Druking/Kim Kyung Soo online opinion rigging case, the 1980 Kwangju massacre denial bill, and finally the Chunggyecheon Berlin Wall graffiti case. (Professor Andrew Koppelman andAndra Matei)
April 24: Open Net published a statement criticizing a bill compelling online service providers to secure “adequate network capacity”.
May-July: Open Net published a public statement and submitted an opinion to the National Assembly requesting to enhance notification requirements for wiretapping, an opinion to the National Assembly opposing the Telecommunications Business Act bill that aims to expand reasons for warrantless access to subscriber data.
May 14: Open Net joined a coalition of 97 NGOs for the preparation of the NGO report on the fifth periodic report to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and drafted sections on net neutrality, truth defamation laws, insult laws, and the smartphone monitoring law.
May 21: Open Net conducted preliminary research on Kakao and Samsung for Ranking Digital Rights (RDR) and released its findings regarding the 2019 Corporate Accountability Index.
Jun 6: Open Net was awardedSpecial Consultative Status from the United Nations Economic and Social Council(ECOSOC).
Jun 11-14: Open Net participated in RightsCon 2019 held in Tunis, Tunisia, speaking on asymmetrical disinformation war, 5G network slicing, face recognition, cybercrime laws, and right to be forgotten.
Jun 21: Open Net and Game Industry Standard Organization co-hosted a seminar titled “WHO’s Inclusion of Gaming Disorder in the International Classification of Diseases and Freedom of Speech”.
Jun 24: Open Net hosted a seminar with the embassy of France where Jean-Gabriel Ganascia, the leading French expert in artificial intelligence, spoke on internalization of prejudices.
Jun 28: In cooperation with Representative Shin Dongkeun, Representative Noh Woongrae, Commons Foundation, and the Culture and Art Workers Alliance, Open Net co-hosteda seminar held in the National Assembly on Copyright Act reform and its adoption to protect creative workers.
July 2: Open Net hosted a press meeting with Professor Ashutosh Bhagwat of UC Davis Law School a press release, and discussed Representative Khang Hyoshang’s revelation on the conversation between President Moon and President Trump and the Official Secrets Act.
July 5: The 8th Korea Internet Governance Forum(KrIGF) hosted 9 workshops on issues that the internet communities recommended under the slogan of “Sustainable Internet, Governance Together”. Open Net co-hosted the event and held workshops on the issues of Net Neutrality and Open Data Analysis.
July 9: Open Net Director Park Kyung-sin gave a lecture on the topic of “Social Media Governance” during the Asia Pacific School on Internet Governance(APSIG) held on July 7 to July 10.
July 11-26: 11 NGOs, including Open Net, hosted the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy Joseph Cannataci’s visit to Korea through a press conference, a series of stakeholder meetings, and a seminar on government censorship in Korean society and protection of personal information in the digital era.
July 11: Professor at Korea University Law School and a co-founder and director of Open Net Korea, Kyung-Sin Park has been appointed to the Global Media Freedom Initiative’s High-Level Panel of Legal Experts for 2019/2020.
August 2: Open Net released a public statement opposing proposed amendments to the Broadcasting Act that aims to incorporate OTT Business Operators under its regulatory scope and submitted an opinion to the National Assembly.
August 23: Open Netpublished a statement welcoming the ruling by the Administrative Court in favor of Facebook opposite. Korean Communications Commission and called on the government to stop its efforts to hold content providers responsible for the cost and abolish “sender-pay rule”, and “network use fee”.
August 26: Open Net released a statement calling for the game boosting punishment law to be repealed.
August 29: Open Neturged Representative Na Kyungwon to drop her criminal complaints against those who have written insulting comments about her, and called on the National Assembly to pass Representative Keum Taesup’s proposed amendment to the Criminal Act that abolishes criminal Insult laws. In addition, Open Net is providing free legal aid to those who have been indicted for insulting Representative Na.
September 5: Open Net released the Special Rapporteur’s communication on SNI filtering and provided criticism of the Korea Communications Commission’s response to the mandate.
September 23-25: Open Net joined a coalition of NGOs in UN Committee on Rights of Children (CRC)’s review of the Republic of Korea and submitted a report on child privacy, and submitted an opinion to the CRC voicing out its concern over inclusion of animation and cartoons in the definition of ‘child pornography’.
September 27: Open Net submitted an opinion to the National Assembly opposing theInformation and Communications Network Act reform bill(#2022434) attempting to criminalize the purchase of tickets using automated programs.
October 4: Open Net hosted a conference with special host David Kaye, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression on truth defamation, virtual child pornography, online opinion rigging,etc. (Presentation Materials/Summary)
October 28: In the wake of the Welcome To Video(W2V) indictment, Open Net denounced the Courts’ continued leniency towards those who have been indicted for sexual crimes against children and published a statement showing a strong need to distinguish clearly between child sexual abuse content and virtual child pornography.
October 29: Open Net kicked off its “Protecting WOMAD for Gender Equality and Digital Intermediary Liability Safe Harbor” campaign in accordance with the Manila principles of intermediary liability safe harbor. Open Net is starting a petition and fundraiser to help provide legal aid to the operator of WOMAD who is unable to return to Korea for fear of unfair criminal prosecution.
October 29: Every Tuesday at 7pm through 9pm from October 29 to November 19, Open Net is hosting the 6th session of Open Net Academy on the topic of “The Internet and Feminism”.