UPPER ROOM's September 2 announcement about pursuing legal action on Mark Lee's behalf is the latest example of a young, independent label following that same script.
But "following the script" and "having the resources to execute it" aren't the same thing. Comparing how a handful of agencies — from HYBE's in-house label to solo, artist-founded companies — have handled nearly identical situations shows just how uneven the playing field is.
The Basic Playbook, No Matter the Size
Korean entertainment agencies generally rely on the same two legal tools when responding to online harassment: a defamation complaint under the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection, and an insult charge under the Criminal Act. Both require the agency to collect and preserve evidence — screenshots, IP logs, timestamps — before filing anything with police or prosecutors.
Once a complaint is filed, agencies typically wait for law enforcement to identify the poster, which can take weeks or months, especially for anonymous accounts on community sites or overseas platforms. That waiting period is where the differences between agencies start to show.
How the Majors Run It
At the largest labels, this work is largely industrialized. Big Hit Music, the HYBE label behind BTS, has described this as a standing, year-round function rather than a one-off response.Regularly filing new criminal complaints as fresh evidence comes in from fans and its own monitoring team, and in past updates it detailed pursuing a single poster who had used dozens of different IP addresses on the community site DC Inside to evade detection.
Kim Soo Hyun's agency, Gold Medalist — a mid-sized but well-established company — followed a similar template in 2025, filing complaints for both defamation and insult, then explicitly noting it was coordinating with overseas legal representatives to pursue claims against foreign platforms like YouTube and X.
That last part matters: pursuing a poster on a Korean site is one process, but requesting that a U.S.-based platform hand over a user's identity requires a completely separate legal track through American courts, usually with local counsel retained specifically for that purpose.
Starship Entertainment, home to acts like Monsta X and IVE, has taken this further still, sharing updates on an ongoing lawsuit against repeat offenders and even confirming that prosecutors had sought jail time for some of them. Jellyfish Entertainment and ASND, Red Velvet's Wendy's agency, have followed comparable paths — sustained monitoring over months, escalating from public warnings to formal evidence collection to filed complaints.
What these companies share is scale: legal or compliance staff whose job includes this kind of monitoring, existing relationships with law firms that specialize in defamation and entertainment law, and — critically — the budget to run parallel legal processes in Korea and abroad at the same time.
When the Artist Is Also the Company
Independent, artist-founded labels are a different story. IU's own agency, EDAM Entertainment, offers the clearest comparison point to UPPER ROOM: a company built around a single global star, run without the layered legal department of a conglomerate.
In February, EDAM announced sweeping legal action covering not just online defamation but offline safety threats, including people showing up at IU's home or her family's residence.
To pursue the online piece, the agency confirmed it had filed civil suits against users on platforms like Threads and was going through U.S. courts to compel disclosure of their identities — the same resource-heavy, cross-border process the bigger labels use, but run by a company with a far smaller staff and a single artist's revenue behind it.
That's the core tension facing companies like EDAM and UPPER ROOM. The legal tools available to them are technically identical to what HYBE or SM can access — Korean defamation law doesn't scale legal protection to company size.
What's different is everything around the filing: who's watching for the harassment in the first place, who drafts and reviews the public statement, who manages the fallout if a filing becomes its own news story, and who catches problems — cultural, reputational, or otherwise — before they happen. A major label spreads that work across dozens of specialized employees.
An artist-run label often runs it through a handful of people, sometimes including the artist himself in his capacity as an executive.
That structural gap doesn't only show up in legal response speed. It also shows up in the kind of internal review that's supposed to prevent a crisis before legal action is ever needed — wardrobe approval, content sign-off, the layers of people who might flag a problem before it reaches the public.
Smaller companies are still building those layers as they go, which is part of why early missteps tend to hit independent labels harder than they would a company with decades of established review processes.
The Overseas Problem Is Its Own Hurdle
Nearly every agency quoted above eventually runs into the same wall: Korean courts can only do so much when the harassment lives on a foreign platform. Requesting user data from X, YouTube, or Threads means filing through American legal channels, which typically requires retaining U.S. counsel, translating and notarizing documentation, and waiting on a separate timeline entirely disconnected from the Korean criminal process.
For a major label, that's a matter of looping in an existing international legal team. For a smaller company, it can mean sourcing new counsel from scratch for every case that crosses a border — an expensive, slow process that has to be repeated each time.
What This Means for a Label Like UPPER ROOM
None of this is a knock on any specific company's intentions. The statements issued by Big Hit, EDAM, Gold Medalist, Starship, Jellyfish, and now UPPER ROOM all use strikingly similar language — monitoring, evidence, malicious slander, cyberbullying, firm legal action — because they're all working within the same narrow set of Korean legal remedies. The difference is capacity, not commitment.
For newer, independent companies, that capacity gap is something to build over time: formal partnerships with law firms that already have overseas litigation experience, dedicated staff for monitoring rather than folding it into general management duties, and internal review processes robust enough to catch problems before they require a legal response at all.
Labels like EDAM have had a few years longer to build that infrastructure than a company like UPPER ROOM, which is still in its first year.
Whether UPPER ROOM's September 2 statement translates into the kind of sustained, multi-platform legal push that EDAM or Gold Medalist have run will likely depend less on intent — which the statement makes clear — and more on how quickly the label can build out the same kind of infrastructure that its larger peers have had years to develop.
