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by lifthrasiir 715 days ago
I wouldn't comment over other statements, but...

> Distribution of porn is illegal there and they do their best to block it from outside.

Incorrect, it's yet another incorrect meme. Legal pornography is always possible in South Korea, and while the actual threshold varied over time (because you know, there is no objective metric for them anyway so it has to be a function of the approximate social consensus), legal pornography is not necessarily "milder" than illegal pornography distributed via blocked websites. (EDIT: incorrectly put "stronger" there...)

The South Korean treatment of pornography was extremely distorted mainly because of the rampant copyright violation over pornographic materials produced elsewhere. That blocked virtually all attempts to sell legal pornography and profit from it, why would you pay when you already have tons of free porns out there. Technically speaking, a large portion of the current adult population should have been found guilty if foreign producers could sue them, and I can tell you that the name of a certain blocked but still popular pornographic website [1] has became a household name for many males in their 20s and 30s!

And here is where the SK law's technical distinction between legal pornography and illegal obsence material turned out to be handy. Since those websites distributed pornography illegally, you can just consider them obscene and thus exempted from the copyright protection (!). I really hate this situation and like to see the radical change, but I can also see that it would become a massive and uncontrollable international affair otherwise. So that's why those websites had to be banned (to signal that it is indeed illegal), but the ban itself is so weak that it can be easily bypassed (more effective ban would be harder to justify).

[1] I don't like to quote its exact name, but as a hint, it is often followed by "꺼라 turn sth off".

3 comments

I don’t think it’s a stretch to argue that porn is “de facto” illegal in South Korea
Thank you for taking time to write this explanation, but otoh it's a lot of words to say that it's "kinda illegal"
"Kinda" may mean so many things that "kinda illegal" is as useful as no information, hence all these elaborations. They also matter for the eventual resolution.
I beg to differ. Using "Incorrect" to counter the statement that distribution is illegal implies it's largely untrue. While a distinction between "illegal" and "de facto illegal" exists, your own explanation doesn't support such a strong rebuttal.

You acknowledge that legal pornography, while technically possible, faces significant hurdles due to rampant piracy and legal loopholes. This creates a situation where accessing legal pornography is difficult and impractical for most, making the initial statement, that distribution is effectively illegal, more accurate than your initial "Incorrect" suggests.

Maybe I should have also explained that, in spite of these difficulties, there do exist lots of pornographic materials legally available in South Korea. There are many adult-oriented channels in many cable television providers for example. If my wording made you think that legal pornography is technically possible but practically dead in SK, it is my fault. Legal pornography is okay, but just less popular than illegal pornography, I meant to say. (Probably because it is still a taboo to openly say about illegal pornography.)
> Incorrect, it's yet another incorrect meme. Legal pornography is always possible in South Korea

I never said pornography is illegal.