The Marmot’s Hole

The Chosun Ilbo reports that something like 30% of Korean film posters may be ripping off from foreign film posters and album covers.

Officials who work in the poster business say the key problem is that when making posters, designers often reference foreign works and use foreign works to show their design concepts to advertisers, who in turn become fixated on the foreign posters. This is especially the case recently, with interest in film marketing increasing dramatically, although the plagiarism is worse when production costs are lower.

Another problem is that unlike overseas, Koreans don’t really view posters as copyrighted material. A senior fellow at the Korea Broadcasting Institute said the general lack of guilt in Korea about plagiarism is a problem affecting the prestige of culture-producing nations like Korea and, one of these days, could lead to great economic damage.