Starship Entertainment Takes Strong Legal Action Against Malicious YouTubers

Starship Entertainment has announced legal action against YouTubers who have maliciously published false content about their artists including IVE.

On July 25, the agency released the following statement:

Hello. This is Starship Entertainment.

This is an announcement about legal action for the violation of Starship Entertainment artists’ rights.

We have been taking strong legal action regarding instances of malicious slander, circulation of false information, posts with personal attacks, and defamatory posts and comments.

In October 2022, we filed a legal complaint against persistent malicious commenters, and they received sentences of six months in prison, employment restriction, and listing on the sex offender registry. Since November 2022, via LIWU Law Group (legal representative Chong Kyung Suk), we have been carrying out a criminal and civil suit and also a lawsuit overseas. In May 2023, we were granted an information provision order from the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, and in July 2023, we managed to obtain meaningful information about the “Sojang” channel manager from the Google headquarters in the United States. Unfortunately however, around the time Google notified the “Sojang” channel manager about the information provision order, “Sojang” suddenly claimed that their channel was hacked and deleted the existing videos on their channel, and the channel account was deleted followed by an apology.

It is well known that “Sojang” caused serious defamation of our artist IVE’s members by continuously spreading false information, which also interfered with our agency’s operations, and they admitted this in the recent post on NATE PANN which claims to have been written by “Sojang” themselves. Regardless of the veracity and real intention behind the apology of “Sojang,” Starship will hold civil and criminal liability for their past illegal acts through the ongoing lawsuit.

Our agency is currently additionally verifying the personal information of the hosts of “cyber wrecker” (Korean slang term referring to those who maliciously spread false rumors online) channels including “Sojang” through legal procedures. It is not that there was no legal action taken against the other “cyber wreckers” in the past, but in many cases, these legal procedures were ceased because we could not identify their identities in the end. However, unlike previous cases, we have taken measures with the help of LIWU Law Group through which we could get significant information regarding their identities, and we plan to hold those “cyber wrecker” channel creators including “Sojang” accountable.

We are constantly operating a monitoring system to protect the rights of our artists including their reputation, privacy, and their human rights, and we plan to take all possible legal actions without leniency for the current and future cases of defamation or other additional damages caused to the artists.

We ask for fans to continuously send reports as they have been of great assistance in our response to the legal proceedings and legal actions.

Thank you.

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