Seoul's Gangnam Police Office indicted three executives from famous Internet portal site "N," including one identified as Lee, Thursday, on charges of aiding users to exchange obscene material on the Internet. It marks the first case for portal site webmasters to be indicted due to pornography posted by ordinary users.

Having launched and run "Photo Album," a service for users to upload pictures for free since November 2001, "N" is accused of neglecting monitoring duties with regard to obscene material, and doing nothing about some 100 pornographic pictures being accessed by minors, according to the police.

"N" removed obscene pictures that violated the Information Communication Ethics Committee guidelines by hiring four part-time workers, but neglected monitoring activities, including blocking search functions for obscene words or checking ages. Regarding this, "N" argued the obscene materials were an extremely small part of some 13 million pictures in total, noting that it happened because they could not check all pictures posted by some 6 million members.

In related news, police indicted two suspects including one identified as Park from a well-known music website "B," without detention, for airing 20 adult movies they categorized as normal movies, allowing teenagers to pay W1,000 to watch them,

(Kim Su-hae, sh-kim@chosun.com )