Allegation of Plagiarism Hits 'King and the Clown'
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By Bae Keun-min
Staff Reporter
The triumphant achievement of the 10-million-viewer mark by `The King and the Clown", a film about a notorious tyrant king of the Choson Kingdom and his court jesters, may be tainted as allegations over its possible copyright violation have emerged.
Yoon Young-sun, playwright and professor at the Korea National University of Arts, yesterday filed a provisional disposition at the Seoul Central District Court against the film's director, Lee Joon-ik, and production companies, Eagle Pictures and Cine World, to ban screening of the film and other forms of commercial reproduction including as DVD and videotape, claiming it contains some dialogue from his play.
Yoon said the film infringes copyright as it takes lines from his 1997 play, "Kiss", without his agreement.
The famous "blind" skit of jesters Kong-gil and Jang-saeng in the film is at the center of the legal dispute with the line "I am here, and you are there" as an example of the lines also in Yoon's play, he said.
"I found the film uses lines from my play without my consent when I watched it last month. It is an obvious literary piracy. It is possible that people may think that `Kiss' plagiarizes dialogue from the `The King and the Clown"', Yoon said in the request to the court.
The skit, shown in the beginning and in the last part of the film, symbolizes the relationship between Kong-gil and Jang-saeng, who impersonate the blind in the skit, as they repeatedly fail to reach each other while reading those lines.
Yoon said he met Kim Tae-woong, writer and director of the play `Yi', on which the film is based, and Kim told the companies producing the film about the original source of the lines. Kim clarified "Kiss" provides the source of the lines in the program booklet for the two-month encore run for "Yi" from last December.
"However, the companies and director Lee Joon-ik have delayed the request to verify the truth and again on one pretext or another", Yoon said.
Showing the film equals using the lines from "Kiss" without prior approval from the copyright holder of the play, which is an original literary work with a creative expression of feelings, Yoon said.
Staff Reporter
The triumphant achievement of the 10-million-viewer mark by `The King and the Clown", a film about a notorious tyrant king of the Choson Kingdom and his court jesters, may be tainted as allegations over its possible copyright violation have emerged.
Yoon Young-sun, playwright and professor at the Korea National University of Arts, yesterday filed a provisional disposition at the Seoul Central District Court against the film's director, Lee Joon-ik, and production companies, Eagle Pictures and Cine World, to ban screening of the film and other forms of commercial reproduction including as DVD and videotape, claiming it contains some dialogue from his play.
Yoon said the film infringes copyright as it takes lines from his 1997 play, "Kiss", without his agreement.
The famous "blind" skit of jesters Kong-gil and Jang-saeng in the film is at the center of the legal dispute with the line "I am here, and you are there" as an example of the lines also in Yoon's play, he said.
"I found the film uses lines from my play without my consent when I watched it last month. It is an obvious literary piracy. It is possible that people may think that `Kiss' plagiarizes dialogue from the `The King and the Clown"', Yoon said in the request to the court.
The skit, shown in the beginning and in the last part of the film, symbolizes the relationship between Kong-gil and Jang-saeng, who impersonate the blind in the skit, as they repeatedly fail to reach each other while reading those lines.
Yoon said he met Kim Tae-woong, writer and director of the play `Yi', on which the film is based, and Kim told the companies producing the film about the original source of the lines. Kim clarified "Kiss" provides the source of the lines in the program booklet for the two-month encore run for "Yi" from last December.
"However, the companies and director Lee Joon-ik have delayed the request to verify the truth and again on one pretext or another", Yoon said.
Showing the film equals using the lines from "Kiss" without prior approval from the copyright holder of the play, which is an original literary work with a creative expression of feelings, Yoon said.
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