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The Supreme Court on Wednesday effectively ended two years and seven months of a legal battle over nude photographs and drawings of genitals posted on the Internet by a middle school art teacher by ruling the images were ¡°injurious to a normal person's sense of sexual shame.¡±
The Supreme Court returned the case of Kim In-gyu (43), charged with posting obscene materials on his homepage, to the High Court, saying obscenity was independent of the subjective intention of its creator. ¡°Rather we must judge it objectively and normatively in accordance with healthy, generally accepted ideas of the age from the position of the average individual in society," the bench said.
The bench ruled three images on Kim¡¯s homepage obscene, rejecting Kim¡¯s arguments to the contrary. It damned a highly detailed drawing of the female pudenda because the depiction was very accurate, the coloring realistic and the drawing dominated by the image of the genitals. It said a full-frontal nude photograph of Kim and his pregnant wife was obscene despite claims by the artist that the intention was to portray the beauty of the human form, saying it was unnecessary to explicitly reveal the faces and genitals. It also censored a drawing of an erect, ejaculating penis on the grounds that it was bound to provoke ordinary people¡¯s sense of sexual imagination or shame.
Kim was booked in January 2001 for creating a "nude aesthetics" section on his homepage and posting nude artwork and photographs of himself and his pregnant wife in the buff. A lower court acquitted the art teacher saying, "One can easily see the defendant's intention to oppose the commercialization of sex, and taken as a whole, [the pictures] cannot be seen as so injurious to one¡¯s sense of sexual shame that they exceed the socially accepted scope of permissibility."
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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