🔗 2024-06-10 BELIFT LAB Official YouTube: ‘BELIFT LAB’s Position on Plagiarism Claims’

April 16, 2024

To ADOR CEO Min Hee-jin and Vice President Shin Dong-hun

Regarding your claim in the opinion letter sent on April 3 that the music, visuals, and choreography of ILLIT’s first mini album ‘Super Real Me’ are similar to NewJeans’ existing content, we would like to respond as follows.

First, in the case of the choreography videos you cited as having similarities, these are movements commonly used in connection with other movements in choreography across various genres of music, not just K-POP. Choreography must be evaluated by looking at the synchronization, expression, and flow throughout an entire song. One must not point to momentary partial movements in isolation and claim ‘this is the same choreography as something that came before, it’s plagiarism.’ When judging similarity in music, chord progressions and two or three bars of melody are examined together—and choreography, which must express music through the body, inevitably has even more limitations in its expression.

In the case of music and visuals, you did not specifically point out similar passages but instead captured and presented as evidence posts written online saying ‘it looks similar’ and writings from YouTubers and critics. We would be able to respond in more detail if you could specify the similarities more concretely.

We would also like to point out that there are equally as many rebuttals saying ‘it’s not similar’ in response to the claims that ‘it looks similar.’ In particular, the ‘it looks similar’ claims that were raised before ILLIT’s music and content were fully released decreased significantly after the full content was released and activities began, and opinions saying ‘it’s not similar’ or ‘this is clearly [manufactured] virality’ have been noticeably increasing.

Lastly, we would also like to clearly address the claim that we used NewJeans in attention-seeking marketing. We have never even considered marketing activities that mention or compare NewJeans. All news or content that mentions ILLIT in connection with NewJeans is unrelated to our intentions. We cannot control the public or media producing content that simultaneously leverages interest in ILLIT and NewJeans’ prominence. If you review the list of press releases distributed by us during ILLIT’s debut process (#attachment), you will see that we did not use the name of NewJeans or any other senior artists in ILLIT’s marketing.

The above is our response.

April 16, 2024. BELIFT LAB CEO Kim Tae-ho.