| |
| |
 |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
SEOUL: North Korea has tightened its crackdown on foreign films after an elite college student was arrested for downloading and watching a bootleg file of a South Korean blockbuster, a defector group said on Monday.
The student in Pyongyang was caught on September 5 while watching a digital copy of "Haeundae" with his dorm friends, the North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity said in a newsletter posted on its website.
The student allegedly acquired a file of the film at a relative's house in the northeastern port city of Chongjin and downloaded it onto his college computer, it said.
The case prompted authorities to launch an extensive probe aimed at preventing the spread of the movie, the group said, quoting a "correspondent" in the North.
The inspection revealed that tens of thousands of North Koreans have secretly seen foreign films, it said.
Defectors say South Korean pop songs and movies are popular in the isolated communist country, despite a steady campaign to weed out what state media has termed "decadent foreign culture and ideals".
In December 2007, three North Koreans including a schoolteacher were sentenced to death for smuggling illegal adult films from China and South Korea, according to Good Friends, a Seoul-based aid group working in the North.
The digital copy of "Haeundae", a disaster flick which drew more than 10 million viewers in South Korea, was first leaked by an audio technician in Seoul.
South Korean police recently detained three people on charges of piracy after a copy of the movie was uploaded onto a file-sharing site last month and sold to 24 countries.
- AFP/so
|
