Former Media Executive Fined for Tampering with Union Comments

A former media executive has been fined 5 million won for illegally modifying negative comments about himself on a company union bulletin board by exploiting a password error. The Supreme Court upheld this ruling on December 20, confirming the lower court's decision.

The individual, identified only as Lee, was accused of unauthorized alterations to a comment posted on the company intranet in January 2022. The comment, made by a journalist referred to as A, stated, 'That's enough, please leave.' Due to a technical glitch, anyone could edit comments by entering any number in the password field, which Lee took advantage of to add his own remarks to A's comment, stating, 'While it's true I dislike the representative, I wrote the comment because I hate not being recognized. That doesn't mean I'm on the chairman's side.'

The key legal issues revolved around whether Lee's actions constituted 'unauthorized access to an information network' and the definition of 'information damage.' During the trial, Lee argued that as the company representative, he had legitimate access to the union bulletin board and that the comment was merely an expression of emotion, not personal information. He claimed that since he only added text without deleting the original comment, he did not damage any information.

However, the first-instance court ruled that regardless of the technical error, Lee's unauthorized modification of another person's comment constituted 'unauthorized access' and that altering the content changed the original meaning, thus qualifying as 'information damage.' The appellate court dismissed Lee's appeal, and the Supreme Court also rejected his case, stating that there was no misinterpretation of the law in the original ruling.