Portal Sites to Face Higher Accountability for Posts

Internet portal sites have earned a fortune from the posts of users, but have dumped all liability claims on the users through unilateral standard form contracts.

The Fair Trade Commission has ended this practice.

The commission said yesterday that it examined 110 contracts portal sites have used, including 81 for regular users and 29 for advertisers. Almost half of them, or 50 forms, were written only for the sites.

The commission ordered the sites to straighten out the agreements by the end of September.

The latest move seeks to hold the portal sites more accountable for user posts. This is expected to have a ripple effect on the investigation into online threats made against sponsors of certain newspapers and defamation lawsuits.

According to the commission, major portal sites such as Naver and Daum used to change the terms of their user agreements by posting amendments on the main page for a short period of time.

This practice violates a user’s right to fair agreement, authorities said, and online corporations should have informed each user of the change.

Certain companies infringed on user copyrights by authorizing themselves in the contract to arbitrarily use, reproduce and provide user posts and content to third parties.

Furthermore, the portals unfairly avoided liability when a user post violated a third-party copyright. Even if a portal was found liable according to the standard form, the user was responsible for paying damages.

The commission, however, said the immunity clause is an act of limiting or passing on online liability to users.

In addition, online companies have provided personal information of their users to third parties, citing authority in their user agreements.

Likewise, they held themselves immune from harm arising out of user negligence in managing IDs and passwords.

Certain corporations even imposed fines on users who withdrew their memberships due to negligence by the sites or deprived them of mileage points.

They also assumed no responsibility for the damage to users’ cyber assets such as cyber money or characters. Even when they took responsibility, their statute of limitations was just three months.

A commission official said, “In May, we had them revise numerous unfair clauses and practices. Disputes are arising over the standard form contracts of the portals. Our latest move will dramatically improve fairness.”

As the number of Internet users in Korea increased from 26.27 million in 2002 to 34.82 million last year, the portal sites’ gross sales shot up to 1.52 trillion won from 413.6 billion won over the same period.

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