So it goes for Soribada, or “Sea of Sound,” South Korea’s answer to Napster – except thatinstead of facing a lawsuit, the two U.S.-educated brothers who authored the file-swappingprogram are in deeper trouble.

Yang Jung-hwan, 28, and his 32-year-old brother Yang Il-hwan were indicted Sunday oncriminal charges of copyright violation, meaning they could face up to five years in jail and up to$38,500 in fines if convicted. They are fighting the charges.

“We aren’t gangsters,” said Jung-hwan. “We wanted South Korea to have its own Napster.”

Jung-hwan lives and works with his brother in their parents’ apartment and majored in computer science at Columbia University in New York. Il-hwan studied the same at Virginia Tech.

Their Korean-language program enables users to search each others’ computers for music files and download them.

Launched a year ago, Soribada was bound to be a hit: nearly half of South Korea’s 46 million people access the Internet, one of the world’s highest rates, and high-speed connections that enable a 10-second file transfer for a typical song are widespread.

The Yang brothers deny that their software can be held accountable for copyright violations. It only provides channels of communication and does not control or monitor users’ activities, they say.

“If someone leaks classified secrets over the phone, does that make the telephone company an accomplice?” said Il-hwan.

The Recording Industry Association of Korea, a lobby of 133 music labels that sought theindictment, claims that local labels lost $154 million in album sales last year to Soribada’s 4.5million registered users.

But there is no indication of an overall decline in music sales from 1999 to 2000. The industry says album sales in South Korea totaled $31.5 million in 2000, up from $29.2 million the previous year.

“Soribada is probably affecting our business, but there is no concrete evidence,” said Cho Jin- bae, who handles online marketing at the Seoul office of the EMI record label.

The Soribada case could determine whether local labels file complaints against another Korean-language song-swapping program, Orangeland, that piggybacks on instant-messaging services.

Like the people who run Napster, which a U.S. judge has ordered to block users from sharing pirated songs, the Yang brothers have offered to transform Soribada into a paid service.

The Korean recording association insists that Soribada shut down before any negotiations.

The Yang brothers live mainly off fees paid by MP3-player makers who advertise on Soribada’s home page. Asked how they are doing financially, they said they earn “what most office workers make.”

Korean music fans, meanwhile, seem mostly untroubled by the legal questions surrounding music downloads.

“You’d be a fool to buy CDs when you can get songs on the Internet for free,” said 17-year-old Lee Yong-suk, bobbing his head and swinging his shoulders while listening to South Korea’s No. 1 chart hit, “Already One Year” at an Internet cafe in Seoul. Lee found the love song, by a male duo called “Brown Eyes,” using Soribada.