Among the verdicts for the various Apple vs. Samsung lawsuits coming out, other events have been happening in my personal life that have gotten me again pondering why we see so much blatant copying in Korea. It’s unashamed, as in people are surprised when someone points out that copying may be wrong.
I don’t have a pat answer at the end nor anywhere. Let me lay down some graphic examples of unapologetic copying that are but representatives of a sea of copyright infringements, logo hijackings, and downright plagiarism that anyone can see while walking down a street in Seoul.
Let me get all this off my A.D.D.-riddled brain first. The Korean media and netizen response to the California Apple vs. Samsung verdict have predictably defended Samsung. It’s mostly been loud proclamations of psychological projections. They accuse the jury of being overtly nationalist in their decision to side with Apple while also lambasting their “leftist” press for not being nationalist enough–for admitting that Samsung is a bloated behemoth that is so myopically arrogant and institutionally corrupt that it makes the Sopranos make out like a Girl Scout troop. They criticize the idea of a jury itself, one of the longest lived and most cherished foundations of modern law. They pronounce that juries shouldn’t decide tech-heavy cases, ignoring that there were engineers and patent holders on the jury itself that helped educate those that weren’t up on the technology and patent law. Said the head juror retired engineer Velvin Hogan:
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We were at a stalemate, but some of the jurors were not sure of the patent prosecution process. Some were not sure of how prior art could either render a patent acceptable or whether it could invalidate it. What we did is we started talking about one and when the day was over and I was at home, thinking about that patent claim by claim, limit by limit, I had what we would call an a-ha moment and I suddenly decided I could defend this if it was my patent…And with that, I took that story back to the jury and laid it out for them. They understood the points I was talking about and then we meticulously went patent by patent and claim by claim against the test that the judge had given us, because each patent had a different legal premise to judge on. We got those all sorted out and decided which ones were valid and which ones were not. [link]
Oh, and I imagine that the judges in the Korean case, untainted by an unwashed jury, had those engineering degrees in their pockets?
What it came down to was not anything that technical. It was memos that basically said that Samsung needed to copy Apple and FAST!
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For those who were not here in Korea or have forgotten, let me give a brief history of the smartphone in Korea. The iPhone had already been around for two years before it appeared on Korean shores in 2009. Before then, the average Korean didn’t have Apple on her radar. It was a maker of iPods, which were slowly creeping up on the market share of the popular iRiver MP3 players. People didn’t have Macs. If they did, they were useless because most Korean websites heavily depended on using Microsoft’s defunct ActiveX plug-ins to run them. Some still do, especially for security, even though Microsoft itself has publicly ditched ActiveX.
The Korean mobile makers dominated the Korean marketplace. Nokia was sort of making an appearance, but it was flaccid. Samsung, LG, and company were innovating in making cell phones cuter and fuller of gimmicks, like the unfortunately named Magic Hole. And does anyone remember the craze for the Show phones? They even got K-Pop groups to team up on phone models, like the Lollipop model, whose TV campaign was a hit music video from (at the time) fledgling girl group 2NE1 and Big Bang.
The foreign community was plugged into what was going on overseas, and we were begging to get the iPhone in Korea. We’d mention this to Korean friends and co-workers, who responded with puzzled looks.
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It wasn’t that Apple didn’t want to enter the Korean market. The government had placed protectionist controls to block it out. The iPhone didn’t conform to some outdated data standard that the government required. After a lot of work, this requirement got dropped in 2009. Apple made a carrier partnership with Korea Telecom. The iPhone finally entered the Korean market in late 2009.
This whole time the Korean manufacturers were smug and actually clueless of what was going on in overseas markets. They were smug in the sense that they were banking on Korean nationalism to again support them like they do the car industry. I call it D-War nationalism, after the fervor for the god-awful dragon movie that came out a few years ago that Koreans at the time blindly supported–even giving death threats to a Korean critic who said it wasn’t all that great. The premise is that no matter how shitty the product, Koreans would support it if it was Korean.
Koreans were smarter and savvier than Samsung and LG anticipated. The people who only months before scratched their heads when I mentioned the word “iPhone” were coming up to me saying, “Do you know iPhone? Let me show you.”
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It killed that myth Korean marketers had so much repeated. Korean consumers were pretty much like consumers anywhere in the world. If something’s good they want it. Nationalism be damned. (to some extent)
This was the situation that Samsung found itself in. The memos brought up during the trial that greatly influenced the jury came from this time. The memos proved they simply weren’t listening. They were so busy trying to copy Nokia that they forgot to copy Apple.
So they quickly got some iPhones, reverse engineered them, put Android on them instead of their poorly developed Bada platform–even though they had before laughed the Android developers so far out of their boardroom that they went to Google. There was a lot of crow being eaten but there was still the classic arrogance combined with the frog-in-the-well world perception that got them in trouble in the first place.
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You see, copying is endemic in Korea. Companies have been getting away with it for so long because, really, Korea has been off the radar internationally. No one has paid attention to what Korea has been doing inside Korea, so we have generations of people brought up with the idea that copying successful companies is normal. It’s actually a virtue if it’s in the name of progressing the country or at least the family–of which some see little difference.
I’m also playing with the hypothesis that there’s a little superstition going on there as well. When, say, a pigs feet restaurant does well, other restaurants tend to open up next to it offering the exact same thing, usually at the exact same price. I’m guessing people think there’s some type of magical ju-ju about the location or some magic combination they did to become popular–other than differentiating themselves from the market by making good food.
I received an email from a restaurant owner in Vancouver. He and his partner own a popular sandwich shop called Meat & Bread. They specialize in porchetta sandwiches. If you’re in Vancouver check them out. They’ve been featured on the Food Network, too.
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He wrote saying that a restaurant in Korea was copying them. At first I thought it was some weird overreaction or conspiracy theory. Then he sent me the photographic evidence.
Okay, I can sort of get copying a successful restaurant’s concept and recipe (though it’s still not right). But copying their interior, their serving style, their menu, their logo, and even incorporating their name (“Meat & Bread”) in the logo?
I’m sure the Korean version of this restaurant is good, but do they have to copy it that shamelessly? Is it some superstitious good luck charm? There’s a difference between building on someone else’s idea and just copying someone else’s idea. In fact, many people don’t mind if you copy them if you at least just give them some credit. The Meat & Bread owner mentioned that he only wanted acknowledgement. He wasn’t interested in money or anything like that.
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Featured this Korean restaurant in an article, they copied and pasted the entire article on their blog, which is highly unethical in web publishing.
Just because a lot of people do it doesn’t make it right. Just because other countries do it doesn’t make it right. I think we have all become so jaded from seeing this all the time. I’m guilty of the same. It’s cultural Stockholm Syndrome. We’ve gotten so accustomed to Korea that we’re making excuses for what really is bad behavior. Not cultural differences. Bad behavior.
Actually, my business partner Ms. Kang is upset. She says that this has nothing to do with cultural differences. She grew up in Korea and has occasionally lived overseas. She says that even though Korea has become powerful and successful, there is still a lack of confidence.
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