Hong Kong man fined for linking to porn

Spike says,

The problem with this link is that the South China Morning Post is a subscription-only site. However, this article in today's paper is exactly the type of thing you give coverage to and cries out to be exposed to the world. In brief, a man posted a link to a website that had "porn" in a web forum. He was tracked by his IP address, arrested, pled guilty and fined HK$5,000, roughly US$650.

This is coming hard on the heels of the appeals trial for the only man in the entire world to receive a jail sentence for posting Bit Torrent seeds.

I've written about these two things briefly in my blog: Link, and Link. Here is an excerpt from the newspaper article:

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HK$5,000 fine for Net porn link

Man published an obscene article by directing surfers to offensive photos

Friday May 11, 2007

A Hong Kong man who posted a message with an internet link to an overseas pornographic website was fined yesterday for publishing an obscene article via the internet.

The prosecution and conviction, the city's first under the Control of Obscene and Indecent Articles Ordinance, involved the use of a common computing technique, the police's commercial crime bureau said.

The judgment has worried the local internet community, particularly with regard to possible constraints on the free flow of information.

Questions were also raised on whether guidelines are sufficient to halt online distribution of obscene material.

Woo Tai-wai, 48, pleaded guilty in Kwun Tong Court to publishing eight obscene photos via a local internet forum.

He provided a linked message which, when clicked, would enable other forum users to access an overseas pornographic website showing the photos.

A hyperlink is a graphic or text string which, when clicked, opens a new web page or jumps to a new location in the current page.

Deputy Magistrate Jason Wan Siu-ming fined Woo HK$5,000 in light of his guilty plea and clean record. He also said that while the articles at issue were obscene, they were not extreme or of deviant taste. (...)