Seven months after her arrest, and following years of hiding in New Zealand to evade South Korean authorities, as AVN.com reported in June, the woman who founded the Korean porn mega-site Soranet was sentenced to a four-year prison term on Wednesday.
Pornography is illegal in the Republic of Korea, and the woman—identified publicly only by her family name of Song—was convicted of “aiding and abetting the distribution of obscene material,” according to a report by the BBC.
Song, 46, was also slapped with a massive fine of 1.6 billion Korean won, which is the equivalent of about $1.25 million in U.S. currency, as a penalty for operating the site, even though its servers were located outside of Korea, and so was she after fleeing to New Zealand.
Song started and operated the site with three partners, including her husband, but the other three Soranet operators remain overseas, according to a Straits Times report—in Australia, where they are believed to be legal residents.
In addition to mainstream porn, Soranet was notorious for hosting thousands of “upskirt” and “spy cam” videos, filmed without the knowledge of the women who appear in the videos, many of them uploaded to the site as “revenge porn.” Surreptitiously filmed videos of women have become a “epidemic,” in Korea, according to a BBC report.
“More than 6,000 cases of so-called spy cam porn are reported to the police each year, and 80 percent of the victims are women,” according to the BBC, which also reported that in September, police in the South Korean capital of Seoul said they would no longer carry out regular inspections of public restrooms, combing for the hidden cameras used to film women in states of partial dress, and using the facilities.
The spy cam “epidemic” has sparked protests, with thousands of women nationwide calling for the government to crack down on the secretly filmed videos, and saying that they “live in constant fear of being photographed or filmed without their knowledge,” according to the BBC.
"Beyond the basic concept of pornography, the website severely violated and distorted the values and dignity of children and youths as well as all human beings," a judge said, in passing sentence on Song. “It is difficult to measure how much harm the existence of the website caused our society visibly and invisibly."
But Song protested that she had nothing to do with operating the site, saying that her husband and their two partners, reportedly another couple, managed the Soranet day-to-day operations. The site was online from 1999 to 2016.
Photo: Oregon Department of Transportation/Wikimedia Commons
