Korea's Directors Guild Pushes for Bargaining Rights and Backend Pay – The Hollywood Reporter

South Korea’s powerhouse entertainment industry is beginning to experience some of the same labor unrest that has rocked Hollywood. In an echo of the screenwriters and actors guild strikes that have brought the U.S. film and TV sector to a halt, the Directors Guild of Korea is lobbying its country’s legislature to revise a Copyrights Act that prevents directors from receiving residual pay from hit movies, as well as even holding strikes for collective bargaining.  In April, the Directors Guild of Korea members took to the streets of central Seoul where the country’s Culture Ministry was holding a press conference on local copyright law. It was the group’s first street protest since 1998, when the U.S. government, as part of its Free Trade Agreement between Washington and Seoul, demanded that South Korea abolish its screen quota system, which required local theaters to show Korean films for at least 146 days a year to promote the domestic film industry.  Twenty-five years later, the directors are preparing to gather again to protest what they call the “collapse of the creative foundation” of the Korean film industry.  They are calling for revisions to the existing Copyrights Act, which dictates that all intellectual property
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