Russia

The Russian culture ministry is drafting a bill to limit the distribution of erotic and pornographic products, Russia's deputy culture minister said Monday.

"We are planning to submit appropriate initiatives to the government in the latter half of this year," Pavel Pozhigailo said. "We envisage certain restrictions in this area," he said.

Russia has been waging a longstanding war against pornography for many years. Statesmen and public figures at all levels release regular statements, in which they demand an end to pornography in Russia, although things have not changed. X-rated films and scenes are broadcast on federal TV channels, they can be seen in motion picture episodes and on the pages of a whole variety of specific newspapers and magazines.

The statute of limitations for prosecution on pornography charges is 2 years in Russia.

A source on the Internet said the pornography industry was more lucrative than the income of the top technology companies combined.

Korea

The South Korean government are also declaring war on "obscene material," announcing plans to block access to foreign pornography on the internet.

Ministry of Information and Communication information safety department head Lee Tae Hee, announcing the measures, said that they would seek to block Korea's access to 500 to 600 porn sites.

Lee also said measures would be taken to step up surveillance of the internet.

"We believe that the measure will be quite effective in dealing with obscene material in cyberspace as we found most Internet users obtain such content from foreign pornographic sites and upload them on local portals," a ministry statement said.

The ministry's steps were triggered by a minute-long video with pornographic material which had become freely available last week on such leading internet portals in the country as Yahoo Korea, Daum and Naver which were also accessible to young people.

It took website administrators six hours to remove the video. The suspected culprit faced a possible one-year prison term and a heavy fine, he said.