Many Korean companies have held promotional contests as marketing activities, such as best picture contests, dance video contests, travel review essay contests, and so on. These contests have been notorious for the longstanding practice of contest organizers claiming ownership of copyrights for materials submitted by contest entrants without paying fair compensation. An amendment to the Copyright Act aiming to protect the copyright of contest entrants (the "Proposed Amendment") was brought before the National Assembly on December 22, 2020 that seeks to address this practice, by requiring advertisements for such contests to indicate that the entrant is the creator of a copyrighted work and is entitled to seek compensation for the assignment of his/her intellectual property rights.

Copyright arises the moment a work of authorship is created, and no procedures or formalities are required for the copyright to exist. Thus, a contest entrant holds the copyright for any of his/her works submitted to the contest as soon as they are created. However, it has been common practice for contest organizers to claim ownership of the copyright of submitted works simply by indicating in the rules that "the copyright for the submitted works belong to the organizer."

In 2014, the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) reviewed whether the terms and conditions of such contests organized by certain public institutions and private companies are in violation of the Standardized Contract Regulations Act ("SCRA"). The KFTC determined in several cases that unfair clauses found in the rules of contests, such as terms stipulating that no remuneration would be paid for the copyright assignment, violated the SCRA, and ordered the responsible parties to implement corrective measures. Further, the "Guidelines on Contests for Creative Works," published by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST) and the Korea Copyright Commission, also state that the copyright of a creative work belongs to a contest entrant by default, and in order for the contest organizer to use the work, the organizer must pay fair remuneration to the entrant and have the entrant properly license or assign the intellectual property right.

Despite such actions, a recent survey conducted by the MCST found that contest entrants' rights are still not sufficiently protected, because the copyright for creative works remained in the hands of contest entrants in only 42.5% of the surveyed cases. Accordingly, the Proposed Amendment can be seen as a legislative effort to reverse inadequate protection of contest entrants' copyrights.

In addition to the Proposed Amendment, other amendment bills for the Copyright Act directed at protecting the rights of authors are currently pending before or will be introduced to the National Assembly. Those include a proposed amendment prohibiting blanket assignments or licenses for future works and granting authors the right to seek additional compensation for assigning or licensing works if the compensation originally paid for such assignment/licensing is not fair compared to the assignee's or licensee's profits using such works, and one that grants music performers and producers additional statutory grounds for compensation for transmission of music works through Internet media services such as OTT platforms.