2023, Vol.19, No.2

Journal of Software Assessment and Valuation 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.35

pISSN : 2092-8114 / eISSN : 2733-4384
https://journal.kci.go.kr/ksavs

The Copyright Act recognizes a database as a type of copyrighted work and protects the copyrights of databases as authorship works. It is notable that what is protected under the Copyright Act is not the database itself but the creative expression among its various elements. However, databases, particularly electronic databases, have unique characteristics that make them difficult to perceive and understand compared to other forms of expression. Furthermore, databases are often used in the intermediate stages rather than the final stages, hindering discussions on copyrights for databases. Various legal cases have revealed the absence of effective and reasonable similarity measurement models to prove copyright infringements or violations of other legl rights related to databases. The absence of models makes it difficult to adequately respond to increasing rights infringements and weakens the protection of legitimate rights holders. This study explores directions for developing a reasonable similarity measurement model to address this issue, specifically the direction of deriving a comparison algorithm that is applicable to the problems and various factors of creative expression.

In the Copyright Act, infringement is required to have the same or substantial similarity between the Defendant and the Plaintiff's works. Even if it is not completely the same, it protects even if the substantial similarity between the two works is recognized. However, the practical similarity that is the standard for infringement is an uncertain concept and is characterized by difficulty in preparing generalized standards. In U.S. law, it is called "unfair use," and many theories such as three-stage tests and external/internal tests have been proposed to materialize practical similarities, but each circuit court takes a different position. Discussions are continuing to materialize practical similarities in Korea, but specific individual issues are being proposed. Focusing on these discussions, a critical review of domestic practical similarity criteria was conducted, and implications and directions for laying the foundation were studied by comparing the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals criteria, which is the most similar form to the basic legal principles of domestic copyright.

Recently, the growth of the digital content industry has led to complex rights relationships for creative works, resulting in unfair issues with copyright royalty settlements. To address these problems, various research efforts have been conducted using blockchain technology. However, the existing blockchain systems have limitations in actively integrating with external systems, making it difficult to guarantee the reliability of external data related to copyright royalty transfers. Therefore, this paper proposes a fiat currency transfer system that ensures the reliability of external data by scheduling transfer transactions and preventing duplicate execution of external systems, as well as enabling mutual verification of input/output information among participating nodes during the interaction process between blockchain and external systems. The proposed system improves performance and response speed by completing blockchain requests within a single transaction and ensures the consistency and reliability of external data by propagating the results to all participating nodes.