The Supreme Court of South Korea has recently judged that sexualised depictions of teenagers in anime and manga be considered child pornography. 

The decision counters a previously-made decision from a lower court, and comes after a man known as Lim was prosecuted for illegally sharing adult videos for profit, including animations that featured characters wearing school uniforms. Lim was arrested for violating the child protection law and fined ₩5,000,000 (about $4,300) for failing to remove the animations from his website.

The court previously decided against convicting Lim of distributing child porn as they were animations and didn't feature real children. But the Supreme Court overturned that ruling, citing that: "in the perspective of a common individual of our society, the videos’ contents evidently demonstrate what can be seen as teenagers.”

Pornography as a whole is illegal in South Korea, and although the law is not regularly enforced there are government-mandated blocks on porn websites. 

Lim's case is scheduled to be retrialed under the new ruling. Distributing porn in South Korean can get you a fine or a prison sentence of two years, but child porn would reasonably carry a much more severe sentence. In any case, it's more than likely the Korean government will be cracking down on hentai sites after this instance.

What do you think of this ruling? Should hentai featuring teenagers wearing school uniforms be considered child porn? Drop your thoughts in the comments!