By Isaac Kim
Kwak, a 17-year-old high school student, used Naver’s N-Drive to upload and share illegal contents such as pornography and pirated movies with five of his friends. N-Drive allows users to store up to 30 gigabytes (GB) of material.
“I knew it was illegal but it was the safest way to avoid detection by the police or our parents, so we kept using it,” said Kwak. Among his 29 classmates, 18 of them have shared sexual content on N-Drive at least one time.
“There aren’t many updates on our contents, but the best part is the contents don’t get taken down either,” Kwak said.
Aside from sexual contents, schools and academies use online storage drives such as Daum Cloud or N-Drive to illegally distribute copyrighted material to students. One language academy used the Daum Cloud service to store and share 28,000 books (41.1 GB).
“Online hard drives like Webhard had started out for work application, but now channels illegal contents,” said Hong Hun-gi, head of the Cyber Team at the Copyright Protection Center. “Cloud services may not be as big as Webhard or torrent sites, but if left unchecked, they may grow to harbor more illegal materials.”