Online porn clip slips through,‘bad’ video worries officials

A rogue video clip containing pornographic content was posted on Yahoo! Korea for nearly six hours, sparking wide interest and setting off renewed concerns about user-created Internet videos.
The one-minute clip showing a man and a woman having sex was posted on Yammy, Yahoo! Korea’s service for user-created videos, at around 6 p.m. Sunday. Yahoo! deleted the clip around 11:40 p.m. the same day, but not before it appeared on the main page of Yammy and was viewed more than 20,000 times. On Naver, the leading Internet portal in Korea, “Yahoo video clip” became the most-searched phrase of the day.
Yahoo! Korea released a statement yesterday apologizing for the incident and saying that it felt morally responsible. Police obtained the identity of the person who uploaded the clip and began investigating on charges of distributing pornographic material, which is illegal.
It is not the first time a user-created video containing adult material or violence has become an issue.
Last September, an adult video clip was posted on a private blog hosted by Naver for 18 days, and video portals such as Pandora TV and Africa have carried clips containing rape scenes or pornography before deleting them.
Currently, all Korean Web portals have a monitoring system consisting of two filters. The first is technical, and users cannot post any file that contains words that have been designated obscene by the service. If a person avoids these words, the system cannot determine whether it is a “bad” video or a good one.
The second filter is human. In the case of Yahoo! Korea, which sees about 300 to 500 new video posts a day, there are 45 monitors working in shifts to review posts. Pandora TV, which has uploads of 5,000 to 6,000 video clips a day, has only 20 monitors.
The government is working to resolve the issue of offensive Internet videos. It worries that self-created content on the Internet could become an issue in the December presidential elections.
“But at the same time, we are worried that too much restriction will infringe on freedom of expression,” said Yang Jun-cheol, an official at the Information Ministry.
Min Kyong-bae, a professor at Kyung Hee University, said it all comes down to the user. “Until a sense of ethics settles in the minds of the makers of user-created video clips, such accidents can happen anytime,” he said.

By Wohn Dong-hee Staff Writer [wohn@joongang.co.kr]