I can't speak to Korean law, but this seems like a real stupid take. Actors are different from their characters. You can't damage a character because they aren't real.

In July 2024, the defendant targeted Plave in a series of posts - some containing profanity. Among them were comments that the people behind the avatars "could be ugly in real life" and gave off a "typical Korean man vibe", Korea Times reported.

Unless the guy said much worse things that weren't reported, it seems like South Korean defamation laws are draconian.

So if they are voiced by AI or silent, we can defamate their picture as much as we want?

As long as someone makes money off of it, you can get sued.

They look stupid, this is just corpo music for Koreans no wonder the courts protected them.

I agree that the comments in question seem like nothing to count as defamation, but actual defamation of virtual bands should count as defamation IMO. They're as fictional as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillaz is—every character is one-to-one to their real-life voice actors. Though I guess in that case you might be defaming the voice actor behind the character instead.

Among them were comments that the people behind the avatars "could be ugly in real life" and gave off a "typical Korean man vibe", Korea Times reported.

I wish they'd reprint some of the actually "harmful" comments, because that kind of thing is just shitty online discourse. These examples are also pretty obviously targeted at the anons behind the group, not the avatars, but, again, it's no different from saying "I bet the person behind I Cast Fist is a fat and ugly man" - that's not defamation

But the court rejected the argument, saying that if an avatar was widely recognised to represent someone real, then attacks on the avatar also extended to the real person.

No, it does not. That's a terrible precedent to make. A character is not the person behind it, a character can live on without the original person behind it and can be interpreted by a different person.

Darth Vader sucks egg salad through a hose to eat

Sounds like they represent real people is the reason

Anything that gets in the way of scumbags making money.

anyone know what the claim is to even count as defamation?. That to me seems like what should be the crux.

IE if the claim was "X's voice clearly shows he's dying of cancer." I could see that as defamation. On the other hand "X is summoning demons" that clearly would be fan-fiction.

Not as ridiculous as it sounds if you read the article. They rejected the argument that they were attacking the fictional character and not the people, because they were clearly targeting the people.

The comments aren't illegal everywhere (honestly it's the kinda shit that gets said about every Vtuber, to the point where it's banal to me) but Korea probably has stricter defamation laws than, say, the US.