The Supreme Court on Thursday overturned an appellate court’s decision that pornographic animations showing characters in school uniforms could not be considered child porn and ordered a retrial of the case.

Following a similar decision made in a separate case in May, this is the second decision by the top court that recognizes explicit animations featuring characters that appear to be underage as child porn.



A 45-year-old operator of a file-sharing website, identified only by his surname Lim, was earlier arrested and convicted for sharing obscene videos and violating the child protection law by neglecting to delete porn animations shared on his website and taking profit from them between May 2010 and April 2013.

Both the first and high court had found Lim only guilty of sharing pornography and ordered him to pay a fine of 5 million won ($4,310). The court considered it unreasonable to specify the animation characters as minors just from their uniforms and their young appearance without other evidence of them being underage.

The top court, however, overturned the original ruling, saying, “In the perspective of a common individual of our society, the videos’ contents evidently demonstrate what can be seen as teenagers.”

By Choi Ji-won (jwc@heraldcorp.com)