Partial Quotation

The act of excerpting a portion of a work and quoting it in another work; where the requirements set forth in Article 28 of the Copyright Act are satisfied, a limitation on the author's economic right

Partial Quotation (일부 인용)

Overview

Partial quotation (部分引用) refers to a use in which, rather than reproducing an entire work verbatim, one excerpts only the necessary portion from it and inserts that portion into a new work. Article 28 of the Republic of Korea's Copyright Act provides that “a published work may be quoted within a reasonable scope and in a manner compatible with fair practice for purposes such as news reporting, criticism, education, and research,” thereby recognizing partial quotation that satisfies certain requirements as a ground for limiting authors' economic rights. In other words, partial quotation is a representative exception that can exempt a use from copyright infringement liability, and at the same time it forms the basis of academic and cultural quotation practices that are distinct from plagiarism.

Main Content

Legal Basis

Article 28 of the Copyright Act limits quotation to purposes such as “news reporting, criticism, education, and research,” requires the scope to be “reasonable,” and requires the manner to be “compatible with fair practice.” Internationally, Article 10(1) of the Berne Convention permits “use of a work, including quotation, within the scope compatible with fair practice,” and Article 10(3) requires indication of the source and the name of the author. Although Korean law does not expressly stipulate source attribution as a requirement of Article 28, scholarship and case law regard indication of source as a de facto prerequisite for the establishment of a quotation.

Requirements for Establishment

In practice, the following elements are generally examined to determine whether a partial quotation is lawful.

Subject matter: The work must already have been published.
Purpose: There must be a legitimate purpose such as news reporting, criticism, education, or research.
Principal-subordinate relationship: The quoting work (the work making the quotation) must constitute the essence of the new creation, and the quoted portion (the quoted work) must occupy a subordinate position that supplements or explains it.
Quantitative and qualitative scope: Consideration is given comprehensively to the proportion of the excerpt in the whole, the essential nature of the excerpted portion, and the likelihood of substituting for the market of the original work.
Fairness of manner: Quotation marks, indentation, footnotes, etc. must be used so that the quoted portion is clearly distinguished for readers, and the original author's reputation must not be damaged, nor the work adapted or distorted.
Indication of source: The author's name, the title of the work, and the source (bibliographic information) must be identified.

Types of Quotation

Direct quotation is a method of reproducing the original expression verbatim and requires quotation marks. Indirect quotation (paraphrased quotation) is a method of describing the original meaning while changing the expression; if, beyond simple summary or condensation, the substantial expression of the original work is borrowed as is, it may be evaluated as reproduction rather than quotation. Other issues include partial quotation of charts, images, sheet music, and video clips; excerpting some lines of poetry; and partial reproduction of court judgments or press releases.

Distinction from Plagiarism and Reproduction

Plagiarism is an academic ethics violation in which another person's ideas or expressions are used as one's own without indicating the source, whereas copyright infringement is a legal issue of using a work without the rights holder's permission. Therefore, even if the source is indicated, exceeding the reasonable scope may constitute copyright infringement; conversely, omitting the source makes it difficult to avoid accusations of plagiarism independently of copyright liability. Universities, academic journals, and media organizations separately operate quotation rules and plagiarism verification procedures.

Recent Trends

The issues of 2024–2025 are shifting to quotation problems combined with generative AI. First, as how much and in what manner large language models quote or excerpt training data becomes intertwined with discussions on “the use of data for AI training,” the boundary between the text and data mining (TDM) exception and the scope of quotation has emerged as a major issue in Copyright Act amendment discussions centered on the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. Second, when retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) or summarization services quote parts of original texts and output them, how to ensure source indication and the scope of quotation has become a core requirement of service design. Third, as news copyright partnerships and royalty negotiations between media companies and portals/AI companies gain momentum, the permissible limits of “quoting a few sentences of a title and lead” are again becoming an issue. Fourth, in universities and academic journals, automated citation-checking tools and obligations to disclose the use of generative AI have spread, and standards for rights clearance are also being reorganized regarding cases in which short segments of video or music are quoted in short-form and meme content. In short, partial quotation is expanding from a matter of traditional academic norms to a design norm for platforms and AI services.