This study summarizes issues related to copyright issues around dance or choreography in Korea. As a result of analyzing 42 previous studies, which was searched at RISS(Research Information Sharing Services), three major issues were aroused. First, the concept of dance copyright should be defined more clearly, and the requirements for recognition of creativity in dance works should be clarified. Second, in order to activate dance copyright protection, it is necessary to fix the ephemeral phenomena of dance in tangible media. Third, dance copyright is classified as a dramatic works in Korean Copyright Act, but the term is not appropriate. The main contents of this discussion reviews copyright law and precedents of each country, including Korea. Based on these discussions, a suggested improvement plan for the protection of dance copyright is proposed.

Recently the copyright issue in the traditional cultural field is being discussed due to the copyright claim on traditional dance. The copyright norms is unfamiliar to those who are engaged in traditional cultural fields in Korea. Despite this unfamiliarity, the number of cases in which copyright law is applied to the field of traditional culture is increasing. The copyright cases that have occurred in the field of literary works such as books in the past are now spreading to art, music, and dance. In this article, I have discussed some issues in judging the creativity and substantial similarity of cultural heritage-based works through representative cases of art works and musical works related to intangible cultural heritage. The copyright system is based on the assumption that a specific author has exclusive copyright for the work. On the other hand, many cultural heritages presuppose that ‘communities or groups’ have created, maintained and propagated them, and it is not easy to identify copyright holders because their boundaries are ambiguous. In addition, in order to establish an exclusive right such as copyright, a clear boundary must be set for the work, which is an object of rights, but the boundary of the traditional culture that has continuously changed from the past is not clear. Therefore, I suggest the open source model as an alternative to exclusive copyright.