Woman Who Founded Korean Porn Site Soranet Gets 4 Years In Jail (AVN)

Read the full article by Michael French at AVN.com 

Site hosted hundreds of ‘upskirt’ and ‘spy cam’ videos, setting off nationwide protests

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.