KOREA FOUNDATION

The global popularity of Bong Joon-ho’s acclaimed film Parasite and the boy band BTS’s peaking at No. 1 on the Billboard’s Hot 100 charts illustrate the changing tendency of Korea’s intellectual property rights trade. According to the Bank of Korea, the nation’s trade in arts and culture copyrights registered a surplus during the early half of this year for the first time since the compilation of the statistics began. The central bank classifies arts and culture copyrights into two categories: one for sounds and images, the other for literary works, dramatic works, paintings, architecture, pictures, and sculptures. The growth to a surplus was more noticeable in the sounds and images category. As the competitive power of Korean arts and culture on the global scene has been verified by concrete numbers, expectations are high for meeting even greater challenges in the future.

* This infographic has been produced on the basis of the Bank of Korea’s tentative tally of the “Intellectual Property Right Trade Balance for the First Half of 2020,” released in a public report dated September 18, 2020.

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