RYU Cheol wrote: However, this story indicates that contrary to the earlier report, Google (specifically YouTube) is *not* implementing such a system. I don't know their reasons or what legal analysis was involved, and I hesitate to base my understanding of this law on translated news reports. But I can't imagine why we would try to block South Koreans from contributing, whether or not they comply with the requirements described. --Michael Snow

Assuming it isn't an April Fool's joke, the fact remains that the Wikimedia Foundation is not bound to abide by the laws of South Korea. Google had business there, presumably, while the Foundation does not. Nathan

No, in most cases we don't have to abide by the law tof the United Kingdom. There are hundreds of countries in the world, each with their own different laws, some seemingly quite draconian when it comes to what content is allowed. Imagine, in North Korea the things we say about Kim Jong-il are probably illegal, but we don't have to follow their law because our website is based in... Florida. Mark 2009/4/9 RYU Cheol <rcheol(a)gmail.com>om>:

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 10:24, RYU Cheol <rcheol(a)gmail.com> wrote: If a similar law would be adopted in one of the Western countries, mass campaigns and protests would be inevitable. Perhaps we should expect something like this from Koreans as well? — Kalan

Hello Cheol, first of all, we are all very concerned about this issue and we are still sorting things out. So more informations especially from you in the country would be of great value. To your question at first: According to the comScore data ( http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Stu/comScore ) the Korean Wikipedia had in February 2009 more than 1.1 million visitors. I suppose most of them come from South Korea, so, yes, we have quite certain more than 100,000 visitors from South Korea. My understanding about Google and YouTube is that they decided to close down their subsidiary in South Korea. There are two things that I don't understand at the moment: First, as far as I know companies that are based in South Korea or have subsidiaries there have to obey the law. But how is it with companies outside of South Korea? Is it in the text of the law that website of such companies could be blocked? The second thing that I don't quite understand until now is that it seems they had submitted the law but have decided not to enforce it. Is that the situation at the moment? (This is in so far confusing for me as it says that the gouvernment itself doesn't obey or doesn't expect its citizen to obey the law of the country, which put the total legal system in question.) A rough translation of the law (or the critical part of it) would be helpful for us to judge the situation. Though the reason for your mail is not happy I am happy that you contacted us here. The korean community is until now very very underpresented here and the prospect to have a chapter there one day is very exciting. Ting RYU Cheol wrote: -- Ting Ting's Blog: http://wingphilopp.blogspot.com/