The Korean version of Google Video, the search engine recently launched by Google Korea, is becoming a hotbed of illegal clips. Despite its powerful search technology, the site seems powerless to prevent users uploading pornography and copyrighted content.
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Google's negligence has caused concerns about copyright violation. For example, Type in "Prison Break,” the popular American TV drama, and set the parameters to "more than 20 minutes," and as many as 2,480 43-minute clips show up.
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A similar video search service is also provided by domestic web portals Naver, Daum and Empas, who filter search results in various ways. In the case of Naver, monitoring personnel review search results. But Google is determined not to impose such restrictions on its search function, remaining faithful to the concept of freedom of information.
And the caption to the accompanying photo:
The search word ‘sex’ yields more than 1 million video clips in results on Google Video in this screen capture.
By contrast, typing sex or other dirty words into Naver will bring up an age-verification screen. Once I was looking for a TV clip I had seen on Jeollanam-do, but wanted to see all the videos relating to the area, so I typed "Jeolla" in Korean. Turns out it means "naked," so the search wouldn't go through. I'm not sure what's beyond the formidable ID check, and whether porn will show up after you verify your age. People would be leery, perhaps, of browsing such content if they knew their movements were being recorded.
I talked a little about Google Korea last week when an article came out talking about YouTube Korea's potential adaptation of the "real name system" used on Korean portals. I mentioned that Google Korea eventually agreed to censor search terms on its site, meaning that if you search for something dirty you'll get an age-verification prompt above the results. (However, I'm not sure what's preventing people from searching those same terms on google.com, which does not have such filters.) I couldn't find the original articles that ran at the time, but many were a little over-the-top in accussing Google of exposing children to pornography and other filth, as if the search engine were to blame for the children doing the actual searching. That hubbub came around the time the South Korean government announced it was blocking foreign pornographic websites after apparently some dirty movies were uploaded to an internet portal.
Major internet portals have come under fire recently for a lack of responsibility.
On March 18, two pornographic videos were posted on Yahoo Korea, the nation's second most visited portal and over 20,000 users downloaded the files. Yahoo Korea has faced a barrage of criticism for having left the clips for six hours.
Daum carried a video of half-nude foreign fashion models for seven hours last Tuesday. Naver is also being criticized for not having removed a nude photograph for about four hours.
When you type in a variety of dirty terms in Korean into Google Video you'll find some hardcore porn and nudity, but not surprisingly I guess it's usually foreign. That tells us that not only is Korean porn kind of lame, but that you also have Koreans uploading this foreign pornographic material to Google, unless people from other countries are typing filenames and descriptions in Korean. And clearly Koreans were the ones doing the uploading to the Korean portals, which if I'm not mistaken prohibited foreigners from signing up with them at the time. Google has consistently come under fire in large part, I think, because it is foreign and represents a foreign menace, and South Korea neither likes foreign invaders nor plays nice with foreign companies.
Ironically, South Korea is the biggest consumer of pornography in the world, with the average Korean spending almost four times as much as the average Japanese and nearly twelves times as the average American. I came across those stats from this 2007 blog entry, which is worth a read. An excerpt:
. . . [T]he South Korean government has recently been clamping down on internet sex after some laughably tame incidents in March. An article entitled Foreign Porn Sites Will Be Blocked explains that it all started when two porn videos appeared on Yahoo Korea on March 18th. "Daum, the second-largest portal site, also carried an audio-visual file of foreign fashion models exposing their breasts for approximately seven hours last Tuesday," Korea Times reported. "On the same day, a Web surfer posted a nude photo of a woman at the top portal Naver but the company did not remove the picture for about four hours."
The South Korean government responded to these "wardrobe malfunctions" with wild abandon. “We are set to deny access to porn sites based overseas, with details being unveiled early next week,” said the Ministry of Information and Communication. According to ZD Net Asia, the government's Korea Internet Safety Commission will use domain name and URL filtering methods to check not only IP addresses but also file indexes and sub-directories as well -- "because most of obscene materials originate outside South Korea".
Heh, have a look at the Seoul Times, an English-language online newspaper that routinely has nude and NSFW images in its photo galleries, the one I linked to having been up for the past six months or so. Unsurprisingly they tend to be of foreign fashion models. If you want local talent . . . hmm, I guess you don't have any options outside of the major newspapers, the entertainment websites, the blogs, and the internet cafes devoted to racing girls.
1 comment:
Sure, people upload heaps of stuff to Google video/Youtube that they don't have the rights too.
But, what about Koreans who rip off other people's stuff, and upload it to Korean video sites?
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