Documents found on a North Korean server suggest US studios may have unknowingly outsourced animation work
Documents found on a North Korean server suggest US studios may have unknowingly outsourced animation work
North Korean illustrators and graphic designers appear to have helped produce work for US animation studios unbeknownst to those companies, suggesting that unreleased episodes of a few popular American cartoons could include work from one of the most closed-off economies in the world.
It's been this way for a long time. SEK Studio, North Korea's production company, worked on The Simpsons Movie, Futurama and Avatar: The Last Airbender. (They did not work on Disney films, that's just a rumor.)
The Simpsons gig is of course beautifully referenced to in Banksy's couch gag.
Clerks had a bit on the Korean animation houses too...
That was in 2000. 10 years before the Banksy gag on the Simpsons.
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The revelation comes from a trove of documents recently discovered by US researchers inside a computer server housed in North Korea.
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If they'd consider not being such unfriendly shitbirds they could actually properly participate with the rest of the world.
But, like many people, they're afraid of change, I guess.
They talk a big game but they aren't actually that unfriendly in practice. They haven't funded terrorist organizations or tried to engineer coups in other countries, mostly because they don't have the money or power to but still there are way worse actors on the world stage that the world happily deals with. Just look at Israel which has almost no international sanctions, and Russia with only about a quarter of the world doing some half assed sanctions for a blatant war of aggression.
They're the hermit kingdom and the leadership is mostly concerned with the brutal subjugation of there own citizens and not international affairs.
They have been making nukes but that's more of a defensive response to the loaded gun the u.s. has been pointing at them since there inception rather than some crazy plot to carry out a suicidal offensive nuclear assault on the u.s. or the south.
Defensive response? North Korea invaded South Korea and almost won in the 1950s, until the UN forces pushed them back from the end of the peninsula and an armistice was reached.
"Unknowingly"
I'm sure their private shareholders are absolutely thrilled with slave labor making them a few extra cents per share.
It's insane what we allow people to do to people in the name of "just business" profiteering.
CEOs of the offenders at the time, and anyone who signed off on this, should go to prison. Instead, at most (and likely nothing at all), their companies will receive a fine far less than what they saved using slave labor, which means they'll keep doing similar things.
Difficult to manage their supply chains? This means look the other way.
If they really wanted to, they could very easily avoid north Korean outsourcing. I have never accidentally outsourced to north Korea.
Check the contracts as part of the investigation. If there was no requirement to keep confidentiality or prevent the use ofnslave labor, its willful. If there was and there were nonchecks, its effectively the same thing.
Fine the company double the total amount they paid to outsource at a minimum. It would be interesting if we had fines based on total revenue. As an original for amazon, that's a huge chunk of change. Of course, the company would be legally distant from the main ownership, but one can dream.
I think the actual cause of this is outsourcing to China where you have no transparency as to who actually does the work. It's nearly impossible to outsource to NK from inside the USA, but it's pretty trivial to do it inside China.
My guess is that the work got outsourced twice with one Chinese middeman company keeping the difference.
Oh, I don't doubt that. However the fact that presumable neither of us work in outsourcing and can deduce that makes it seem willful ignorance.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It’s unclear how the files ended up in this tightly controlled portion of the internet, but the researchers who analyzed them told CNN they appear to be the result of work that was unknowingly outsourced to North Korean workers.
Roy found a new North Korean website that outside visitors didn’t need a password to access, unlocking a trove of animation sketches, and shared them with the Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank.
The discovery raises questions about the ability of US tech and creative arts companies to control their supply chains and avoid work that could inadvertently violate sanctions banning countries from doing business with North Korea.
“Seemingly fueled by the desire for unreasonably low-cost labor, foreign media companies continue to subcontract animation work to SEK Studio,” the Treasury Department said in a statement announcing the sanctions.
Battered by sanctions and strapped for cash, the North Korean regime has turned to thousands of IT workers living abroad to bring in hard currency, according to US officials and private experts.
“Treasury remains concerned about North Korean efforts to generate revenue for their weapons programs, including through cybercrime and the abuse of contractors, and urges industry to be vigilant against any attempts to evade sanctions,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
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