[Notice on the suspension of publication of Leviathan comics and copyright dispute]
//This notice will be translated into English as soon as possible and further announced.
//This notice will be translated into Japanese and further announced as soon as possible.
//This notice will be translated into English and Japanese and further announced as soon as possible.
Hello, this is Project Moon CEO Kim Ji-hoon.
I am writing this notice regarding the suspension of publication of the Leviathan comic version that was uploaded.
I received a certified letter from the Wonderlab comics writer and the Leviathan comics writer around December 2023 last year.
The certified letter was received through the 'PM User Association (Game Consumer Association)', which was in a legal dispute until recently, and the content was that Project Moon should give up all rights, including copyright rights, to Wonder Lab and Leviathan comics.
Specifically, we received a final notice that all rights, authorizations, agreements, and consents to Wonder Lab and Leviathan would be completely withdrawn.
In addition, the writers registered themselves as copyright holders with the Korea Copyright Commission without any consultation with Project Moon.
After the first certified letter, we exchanged responses to the certified letters three times, but after our response at the end of January 2024, which attached conversation records and work records, we received no response from the opposing law firm, and Project Moon did not take any action as requested.
After that, the 'Game Consumer Association' and the 'Wonder Lab' writers filed a copyright civil lawsuit against Project Moon.
In order to avoid continuing the copyright dispute and reach a clear conclusion, we will proceed with the copyright dispute lawsuit, and accordingly, we will stop publishing the published Leviathan comic version.
In addition, we decided to actively respond to the notice that Project Moon gave up all rights and unilaterally registered the work with the Korean Copyright Commission, so we have written this notice.
We will proceed with a copyright lawsuit to have the two comics, Wonder Lab and Leviathan, recognized as Project Moon's 'works created in the course of business.'
The information provided below is the limited but detailed information that we can provide at the moment. This is for those who have questions about the situation.
Please read it carefully as it is relatively long.
One of the things Project Moon received was that since Project Moon did not directly participate in the production of the comic, the copyright of the comic is entirely the work of the respective authors, and therefore it is unfair for Project Moon to claim rights to the comic.
However, Project Moon signed a contract with the authors as a contract employee during the comic series. In addition, we wrote a contract and worked on it with the goal of paying a monthly salary during the contract period and treating it as a work-related work that was drawn as a Project Moon employee while receiving a salary.
This content is more clearly stated in the Leviathan cartoon writer recruitment notice, and you can see that it was notified in advance.
2021.05.28 [Project Moon Worldview-based Webtoon Serial Writer Recruitment] -
https://projectmoon.postype.com/post/9941572
There is a record of Project Moon employees, including me as the director, working on the cartoon through direct production feedback such as planning and review during the cartoon production process.
In this way, we wrote a contract to produce cartoons as employees of the company, and regardless of the serialization status of the manuscript, we paid a salary of more than 3 million won, the same as employees, according to the contract every month.
In addition, during the Leviathan serialization, we also paid incentives at the same percentage as the incentives given to the development staff.
In other words, the two writers created the cartoon as employees of Project Moon, and were paid the same compensation as employees according to the contract.
Nevertheless, I do not understand the fact that they claim to be the sole copyright holder as external writers and demand that Project Moon give up all rights, so I plan to take legal action.
Separately from the form of the work, in the case of Leviathan, the writer posted an article saying that Project Moon unilaterally notified them to stop serializing.
I will tell you my position on this. At the time of serialization, Project Moon received a call from the writer saying that it seemed that they would no longer be able to continue serializing Leviathan, and the company accepted this and urgently changed the serialization to a novel while Limbus Company was being developed. In the process, we reached an agreement based on consideration for the other writer, saying that we would post a notice stating that Project Moon was largely at fault so that the writer would not suffer any damages from the responsibility. The writer expressed his gratitude for this, and it remains on record. Although there may have been some immaturity in the process of preparing the Leviathan comic, I would like to clarify that I have never given notice of discontinuation of the series. I plan to submit the conversation and records regarding this in court.
I heard that the Wonderlab writer asked me to draw Leviathan differently from Wonderlab, but not in a PC way. I also answered this in an email exchange with the Wonderlab writer around August of last year. I will transfer some of the email responses from August 2023.
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I would like to cautiously address the question, 'I heard later that Wonderlab was too strong and not in the direction you wanted, and that you asked me not to make the comic 'PC' in the future.'
I don't know where or how the content you mentioned was delivered, but I think the writer must have been very upset and offended when he heard it.
If I may be cautious, when discussing Wonderlab, I remember that at the writer's request and in agreement, we decided not to set or reveal the genders of the Wonderlab characters. However, from then on, we decided that there needed to be settings and descriptions related to gender. This is because, in Project Moon’s works so far, we have tried not to let the narrative or treatment differ depending on gender, but we have rarely decided on gender itself. So, we even thought about deciding on gender in the next work, and I think that kind of story has been distorted.
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Wonder Lab also has records of planning and discussions regarding fantasy entities that appear in the comics.
In 2020, when the company was small, we exchanged work feedback through a group chat room on KakaoTalk, and all of the work and communication records from that time remain. We plan to submit this in full in court as well.
We apologize for causing concern to fans outside of the work in relation to copyright.
We did not respond as much as possible to the posts that the writers made on the Internet, and waited for the misunderstanding to be resolved someday. However, we received a request to give up all rights, so we concluded that we had no choice but to respond.
Project Moon will actively respond to copyright disputes and take action based on the results.
