An amendment to the Game Industry Act, referred for committee review on 16 September 2026, would explicitly define illegal private-server operation, introduce punitive damages for rights holders, create an emergency-blocking mechanism that bypasses standard review, and raise criminal penalties to the level applied to patent/design infringement, treated as a semi-official offense (반의사불벌죄). It targets anyone who produces, distributes, provides, or brokers a game substantially identical or similar to a rights holder's game without authorization, and reaches information/telecommunications service providers as well, including those operating domestic servers that temporarily store such data. No effective date or numeric threshold has been set — this is a pending bill, not current law.
What this means for you
- This is not yet in force. The bill is at the committee-review stage; nothing changes for your compliance obligations today. Track its progress rather than acting on it now.
- If your title has been the subject of unauthorized private servers, note that the bill would give you a punitive-damages route and a faster, pre-review blocking mechanism — worth flagging to your IP/legal team as a remedy that may become available.
- If you operate hosting, CDN, or other information/telecommunications services with servers physically located in Korea, check whether the bill's corrective-order provisions (Art. 38(7)) would reach your infrastructure if it is used to host or relay unauthorized private-server data, even where you are not the operator of the server itself.
- Watch for the effective date and any threshold detail once the bill advances; the current draft does not specify either, and the criminal-penalty and damages provisions will matter once they do.
Source: 2219989_의사국 의안과_의안원문.pdf