The Korea Times had a piece on the parody debate in which Park Ju-don, director of Digital Inside (also known as DC Inside), contributed some thoughts:
“Parody works contain citizens’ opinions, satire, and humor. It is an infringement of our freedom of expression to judge a parody work by a criterion of the election law, regardless of such things,” said Park Ju-don, director of Digital Inside, an Web site usually called “DC Inside” where many people upload parody images.
“Parody is, and should be, something to be judged by Internet users themselves,” he added.
I agree with Park, of course… except for the last part. And even that comment wouldn’t have bothered me if it were made by anyone other than the head of DC Inside. My beef is this — DC Inside is rather well known in Korea for organizing hacker attacks on foreign websites that offend the nationalist sensibilities of Korean Internet users. The site was smack in the middle of the January’s cyber-Imjinwaeran in which certain Japanese websites — including some that might be classified as “parody sites” — were targeted by Korean hackers, and it also directed hacking attacks against U.S. sites that had uploaded the Kim Sun-il beheading video. In fact, I don’t recall Park ever condemning MIC’s banning of the video, or the block placed on Blogspot and Typepad blogs that resulted from the “war against the video” that he himself played along with. I’m well aware that if I decided to make a parody film poster that Koreans found offensive (not that I would) and the boys and girls at DC Inside found out about it, my site would be hacked down in a New York minute. At that point, one has got to ask, what the fuck’s the difference between having MIC, the National Election Committee or the Grand National Party violating my freedom of expression through a block/arrest and having Park and his DC Inside buddies do it through hacking/cyber bombardments?
