Our law firm recently provided legal advice concerning a potential issue of copyright infringement. The case at hand involved an application equipped with the capacity to provide solutions to questions derived from a specific workbook. The entity seeking counsel was the producer of the application.
Upon thorough examination, we concluded that even if the examination questions were fundamentally integrated with the curriculum-based content structure, these questions remained protected under copyright law, which is upheld as long as there exists a discernable level of intellectual exertion on the part of the examiners and the questions are not replicated word-for-word. Furthermore, a minimum degree of creativity in the formulation of the wordings of the questions or the responses provided renders the questions copyrightable.
Article 30 of the Korean Copyright Act provides that a work may be reproduced for personal, non-commercial utilization. However, this reproduction is strictly constrained to those who aim to directly utilize the work for personal, non-commercial purposes. Consequently, distributing copies of these questions through the application for commercial purposes would constitute a violation of the Copyright Act.
