The KimcheeGI reports a coming mess:

SEOUL, Jan. 14 (Yonhap) — The government’s planned crackdown on rampant illegal online downloading of music, movie and games has driven the country’s Internet users into a state of confusion.

In South Korea, about 36 million people use Internet, or 68.2 percent of the country’s population.

Many of them have personal homepages or blogs containing downloaded music files and lyrics of pop songs and postings from other Internet sites. It has become a part of their daily life to swap music and movie files using peer-to-peer (PSP) programs.

I have to wonder if it will be all downloads that will be cracked down on, or just those of Korean content. I remember discovering after a DVD-piracy crackdown that foreign DVD pirate versions were still widely available, but Korean ones had become scarce. (Or, at least, so it seemed at the time when I was window shopping.)

I also wonder whether individuals will be targeted as much as buinesses, or more. Most bars I’ve seen use computers, and some of them use MP3s rather than the free webradio services. I have to admit it’s hard to see the difference between them, for most people. Do artists whose songs are listened to via bugsmusic get any kind of royalties?