2023 is the 70th anniversary of the enactment of the Criminal Act of the Republic of Korea. Since the enactment of the Act, there has been no change made in the overall structure or the individual elements of the ‘crimes against reputation’, except the addition of monetary penalty to the existing statutory punishment, and the revision made to reflect the change of the currency unit. Notwithstanding, an act of defamation committed to slander someone through information and communications network, which have naturally a greater risk of spread, has been dealt with by additional punishments under not the Criminal Act, but the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection. Today, the crimes against reputation take place in a form that was not possibly anticipated by the legislators at the time when the Criminal Act was enacted. As the majority of the space in which people communicate or play around with each other has moved from offline to online, vicious replies or hate speeches made by people hiding behind anonymity has become a social issue. At the same time, as the importance of freedom of speech or right to know has been emphasized, distinguishing between ‘somewhat extreme expressions’ and ‘insulting remarks’ becomes a legal issue. Lately, a flood of newly coined terms and initial phoneme orthography make it even more difficult to recognize that a certain term or expression can constitute an insult or defamation. Furthermore, with the development of video editing and image synthesizing technologies, expressions made by visual means not only raise a question of defamation, but also become controversial as to whether they constitute libel especially when Generative AI, Chat GPT is involved in making such expressions. With this background, this paper looked into the latest judicial precedents concerning the crimes of defamation and Insult, and discuss some key legal issues.
Ⅰ. 서론
Ⅱ. 명예훼손죄
Ⅲ. 모욕죄
Ⅳ. 나가며
참고문헌