The Korean wave was at it again in the Philippines in the past week. This time, the waves were riding on the heated debate over banning Korean content in favor of Philippine drama.

The senator who opened up the possibility, of course, received a hard bashing for his proposal. With the influx of loathing comments on our social media feeds, many of us have surely felt the fury unleashed by Philippine fans of Korean content. The Philippines is after all the second country with the biggest population of avid supporters of K-Pop alone – surpassing even South Korea in Twitter's 2021 data!

Thankfully, Senator Jinggoy Estrada clarified that his viral comment was an expression of frustration over the untapped potential of world-class actors in the Philippines. It is indeed a frustration we all share.

What good came out of this brouhaha is how the honorable senator fired up the discussion of a long-standing problem not only in the country's film industry but also in the broader creative economy.

That problem has been how despicably low we spend in our creative industries, and how many of us overlook our local culture and history as sources of creative inspiration.

According to UNESCO, the Korean Film Council spent $17.8 million (P996 billion) alone in 2021 as a stimulus package to help the industry rebound from the pandemic. This is a far cry from the P173.3 million budget approved for the Film Development Council of the Philippines in 2021 when the pandemic was raging and filmmakers, producers, and staff were still struggling to get back on their feet.

If you need evidence of how much of these investments have translated into gains in improving film quality and advancing Philippine culture on the global stage, look no further than the furious comments that cascaded our news feeds last week.

A lot of sentiments have been voiced over our notoriety for remaking Korean dramas. We are copying them rather than taking them as an enlightening experience to inspire our film industry's own inward transformation.

If we are striving for diverse original content, we should have no shortage of stories to tell, starting from the diversity of our culture to the yet-uncovered fragments of our rich history.

In fact, GMA's Maria Clara at Ibarra emerged in last week's discussion as netizens cited it as an example of a TV show that keeps the Philippine audience on its toes, rightfully the type of content to invest in more. The positive feedback is reminiscent of the 2015 Heneral Luna film, declared the "highest-grossing Filipino historical film" after breaching the P200 million mark in its fourth week in theaters.

Our mythical monsters and creatures have also beguiled the world over with the streaming of Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo's Trese comics in a TV series format on Netflix.

I can go on and on. But in the end, what these signify is that another leverage for the Philippine creative industry is its people.

According to the World Intellectual Property Organization's 2021 report on the economic contribution of the copyright industries, the Philippines has among the highest share of copyright-based industries jobs to total employment with 14 percent, significantly exceeding the world average mean of about 6 percent.

How has this translated to GDP gains? It was disproportionately small, suggesting that we must begin beefing up our investments and directing them toward quality content that could restore our Golden Age of cinema in the 1950s.

For our film industry to be confident in a return of investments, robust protection of film intellectual properties must also be in place.

I have mentioned in my previous columns the unprecedented revenue loss of the Metro Manila Film Festival in 2021 when its P955 billion revenue in the previous year slipped to P95 million amid a spike in piracy activities on social media. This is a precedent that could massively dampen our filmmakers' spirits if we let the problem slip without tangible action.

IPOPHL commends former FDCP Chair Liza Diño-Seguerra for including the battle against piracy as part of her 10-Point Agenda for the film industry. We remain to be pleased with the new FDCP Chair Tirso Cruz III who also sees the debilitating long-term effects of piracy on films and promised to curb piracy online with equal fervor as his predecessor.

This promise was relayed to me when the IPOPHL team, led by Deputy Director General Teodoro Pascua, met with Chair Cruz and other FDCP representatives to discuss our future activities under our existing partnership that was forged under former Chair Diño-Seguerra's term. Moving forward, we will be holding more events to keep our film industry players fully knowledgeable of how to best protect and enforce their IP rights.

IPOPHL, as a member of the Creative Industries Development Council, will continuously work with our partners in the National Committee on IP Rights to ensure our coordinated approach in government results in improved monitoring of the online landscape as we push for a rolling site-blocking and takedown regime.