🔗 2024-08-15 NewJeans Music Streaming Support Team (now Team Bunnies) Notice

Hello, this is the NewJeans Digital Streaming Team.

We would like to discuss the current status of complaint processing and future proceedings.

The two complaints currently being pursued through professional lawyers are being prepared normally. Generally, proceeding with a complaint takes about a month, but the lawyers are doing their best to process it faster than the usual timeframe.

Recently, many tips have been received regarding malicious posts involving the spread of false facts and defamation against NewJeans and NewJeans’ parents, and our Digital Streaming Team is also collecting information and materials through daily monitoring.

The materials collected so far have been organized as follows: 94 cases from Theqoo, 113 from DC Inside, 67 from Nate Pann, 21 from Naver, 33 from Instiz, and 401 cases distributed on various communities and SNS including Twitter. Some of these materials have been included as grounds for the complaints. Once the current complaints are finalized, we plan to appoint additional professional lawyers to proceed with third-party complaints in the order deemed most likely to result in actual punishment.

We are not proceeding with complaints blindly without any investigation. For these two complaints, we have gone through multiple steps: verifying the feasibility of third-party complaints, requesting legal opinions on litigation proceedings, and holding direct meetings and consultations with professional lawyers several times. We are also continuously receiving additional advice regarding the distribution of malicious posts. This is to handle matters more accurately.

Along with the filing of the complaint, we plan to prepare and disclose in detail the relevant laws and their grounds, as well as the fact that the claims of ’embezzlement’ by the Digital Streaming Team, continuously alleged by specific accounts, are completely untrue.

We would also like to address matters related to media reports continuously mentioned in specific communities.

1. Videos and photos from NewJeans’ trainee days were not disclosed solely through normal media channels. After Dispatch’s exclusive report, photos and video materials without mosaics or media watermarks (logos) spread rapidly on SNS and communities through unknown sources. In particular, we confirmed that the initial distribution channel for the video featuring other (former) trainees without mosaics was YouTube. Dispatch’s second exclusive report was made around 10 AM on July 25, and it was confirmed that the video without mosaics or logos was released on YouTube around 1 PM on the same day (about 3 hours after the report).

Currently, that video has been deleted from YouTube due to ‘ADOR’s copyright infringement report.’ If there were no falsehoods in what HYBE and Dispatch reported about NewJeans, if the materials were disclosed without issues, and if it caused no harm to NewJeans, filing a complaint against a media outlet would have been unthinkable, let alone considered.

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📌 Item 1 regarding “We would also like to address matters related to media reports continuously mentioned in specific communities”

We have confirmed that YouTube, which was identified as the initial distribution site of the video disclosed without mosaics, was not the actual initial distribution site.

It is correct that the video was distributed on the same day, the 25th, but as the exact initial distribution site is currently unknown, we are issuing a correction.

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The date and time of the video uploaded to YouTube was around 1 PM on the 25th, but on the same day, the 25th, a video without mosaics was distributed on Twitter by an account around 9 AM, which was before the second report.

Thank you for the information.

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2. In the current situation where NewJeans has debuted, it is the agency’s duty to announce NewJeans’ injuries. However, disclosing injury records from trainee days before NewJeans’ debut—facts about where they hurt and which practices they couldn’t participate in—via a media outlet’s exclusive report, despite being information from a time at a different agency, is a clear violation of the Personal Information Protection Act. Since a violation of the Personal Information Protection Act is not an offense prosecutable only upon complaint, a third party can file a complaint. The subject of punishment for this is not ‘Dispatch’ but ‘the personal information controller or the person responsible under the Personal Information Protection Act.’
(This has been confirmed several times through consultations with lawyers specializing in entertainment/corporate law.)

Besides this, the exclusive report contained many elements of legal violations and targets subject to third-party complaints, so we decided to file complaints. We do not say things like ‘it’s not illegal’ or ‘why is this a problem’ without any fact-checking or grounds, unlike some people in specific communities.

Also, since the incident occurred, we have received several details from various reporters. We learned facts about how HYBE officials were involved in reports and articles related to HYBE, what kind of contact they made with media desks, and that despite being able to take such measures directly, there was no such action taken for NewJeans.

It is very difficult to achieve good results with a third-party complaint targeting a media outlet, but we will continue to strive and share the progress in detail.

Thank you.