[Viewpoint] Copyright and Youth Startups

Although the Year of the Rat 2020 has opened brightly, the economy remains gloomy. Last year, the economic growth rate was 2%, which was somewhat defended by fiscal policy as a psychological margin. However, as the saying goes, "the devil is in the details," a closer look at the growth content reveals that it is not a desirable growth. Excluding the 1.5% led by the government through fiscal policy from the 2% economic growth, the actual economic growth rate by the private sector was only 0.5%, marking an all-time low economic growth rate. Furthermore, the employment situation is even more dismal. Although short-term part-time employment increased significantly due to fiscal policy, the employment performance of the core of our society, people in their 40s and youth, actually regressed. Nevertheless, in 2020, a strategy is proposed to increase youth employment creation by promoting youth startups utilizing copyrights.

Copyright is one of the intellectual property rights and refers to the personal and property rights granted to the author of a work expressing human thoughts or emotions. Novels, poetry, music, and art are representative examples, and it allows or prohibits others from reproducing, performing, exhibiting, broadcasting, or transmitting the work in certain ways.

Recently, with the global development of cultural and content industries such as K-pop and K-beauty, business models and startups based on copyrights are on the rise. The advancement of the internet and information and communication technology has made it possible to access various content videos from around the world quickly and conveniently through content media platforms like YouTube and Netflix. As the cultural content industry has become one of the major industries in each country and generated enormous profits, copyright has been recognized as an important economic value. As YouTube has grown into a global platform company, the number of individual creators in Korea who create their own copyrighted works and earn copyright revenue through platforms such as AfreecaTV and Musicoin has surged.

According to a 2018 survey by the Ministry of Education and the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education & Training on the desired occupations of 27,265 elementary, middle, and high school students, YouTuber, referring to YouTube creators, ranked 5th among elementary school students' desired occupations, indicating that the number of individual media creators using content is expected to increase further. Additionally, as cultural content technology is expected to continue developing, business models utilizing copyrights will also increase. Therefore, fostering one-person creative enterprises utilizing copyrights is a good strategy to overcome the current economic and employment situation in Korea, and the following measures are necessary.

First, since using copyright-based platform companies increases income, policies to foster copyright platform companies are needed. Copyright-based platform businesses can also be linked to "job creation." As many individual YouTube creators generate significant revenue through one-person media broadcasting like YouTube, more and more people aspire to become YouTube creators, and interest in this field is high. YouTube creators are already recognized as a profession, and due to YouTube's profitability and the low entry barriers allowing ordinary people to become creators, the number of people challenging themselves as YouTube creators is increasing. Through this, one-person creative enterprises can be established.

Second, when value exchange within platforms utilizing copyrights becomes simpler, no transaction fees occur, so the revenue earned by creators increases significantly compared to the current situation. This will encourage new creative activities and contribute to Korea's cultural industry. Therefore, platform companies aiming to commercialize copyrights in the future should actively adopt Fourth Industrial Revolution-based technologies to reduce transaction fees.

Third, policies should be created to activate various creative activities online and maximize the value of copyrights. Potential creators should be supported with knowledge and services that enable them to create, distribute, and transmit their works, helping these activities lead to economic activity and economic growth.

Fourth, it is necessary to strengthen the social safety net for authors. The issue of inequality in contracts with large platforms, broadcasters, or publishers should be alleviated. Cases where creators' copyrights are infringed or they do not receive fair compensation often occur. To resolve this, legal protection and government policy development at the national level are required to protect creators' rights.

Professor Kyunghwan Kim, Graduate School of Global Entrepreneurship, Sungkyunkwan University