The court in South Korea ordered social network users to pay 500,000 won (approximately 7500 crowns) for gossiping K-pop boys, which consists of virtual characters, informs BBC.
The five members of the K-Pop Group called Plavhe were given a voice and animated by anonymous artists using Motion Capture.
Last year, the agency filed a civil action against social network users for derogatory statements about the group that it spread on the Internet.
The court’s decision made in May and published on the website this month is one of the first to deal with virtual idols of K-pop. The band Plave, which debuted in 2023, is one of the most successful K-pop virtual stars with more than a million followers on YouTube, where it regularly publishes music videos and vlogs.
In July 2024, the defendant did not miss vulgar expressions in a series of offensive contributions. “They can be ugly in real life,” he wrote, among other things, in the comments, as Korea Times said.
The defendant claimed that the comments were focused on fictitious characters, not the real persons behind them. The court dismissed this argument. If, according to the Avatar court, it is widely recognized as a representative of a real person, then the Avatar attacks also apply to a real person.
The Agency of the Group, The Country, demanded compensation of 6.5 million won (about 97 thousand crowns) for each of the five artists, with the comments to cause them emotional suffering. However, the court admitted only a fraction of this amount – 100 thousand won per person (approximately 1400 crowns).
The court stated that it decided on the amount of compensation after considering the severity of the offensive comments and the circumstances of the incident, the local media reported. The agency appealed against the amount of damages stipulated by the court with the argument that this case created an important precedent in the area of defamation of virtual avatars.
