방송 프로그램의 포맷에 대한 저작권 보호 및 실질적 유사성의 판단 기준에 관한 연구 : 리얼리티 프로그램을 중심으로

This paper investigates the copyright protection of the 'format' of reality show, which is recently called as 'new blue ocean' in the market of broadcasting contents. The format of broadcasting program has been paid attention to because it starts to generate commercial value. Nevertheless, the legal protection for reality show is limited because of the following nature of reality show. The producers of the reality show only presents the basic outline to the performers without concrete and pre-planed scripts, and consequently the final performance completes with the interaction among the players. Considering such unique characteristics of reality show, this study investigates the necessary conditions to be acknowledged as copyrighted works and the important criteria to judge the substantial similarities which have been applied to the related cases.
The result shows that to protect the format of the program under the copyright law, the genre of the program could be considered as the criterion to judge creativity of compiled works. In other words, it is possible for the format of the program to be protected if it has the originality in the compounding and arranging of the key elements. In addition, to examine the substantial similarity between the reality shows it has to clarify 1) whether the program is created based on new production mechanism, and 2)whether key elements in the program are creatively selected or arranged). The goal of copyright protection is to seek the coordination of balance between creation and joint ownership. If the incentive to create and produce the new type of programs becomes bigger by protecting the format of the program under the copyright law, it is worthy of recognizing the need of the copyright of the format of the program and increasing the level of copyright protection.