Piracy of S.Korean webtoon surges amid content boom

The South Korean industry of webtoons, or digital comics, has seen its original content illegally posted on foreign websites over the past few years. As more Korean dramas based on webtoons gain global popularity, such as "Sweet Home," "Hellbound," and "Itaewon Class" on Netflix, copyright infringement through overseas websites runs rampant.

The number of pageviews (PVs) on Korean webtoon platforms, including Naver Webtoon Corp., Kakao Webtoon Corp. and Lezhin Comics, reached 28.6 billion in 2021, according to state-backed Korea Creative Content Agency data on March 26.

Compared to this, PVs on sites providing pirated Korean webtoons amounted to 33.4 billion in the same year.  

The most-visited pirating website showed 12.1 billion PVs, exceeding Naver Webtoon’s 11.1 billion in 2021. Based on the data, the copyright infringement of Korean webtoons is estimated to have surged by 53.6% to 842.7 billion won ($649.6 million) in the same year. Most of the piracy targets paid content of the original work, an industry source said.

Piracy prevention is not easy as the illegal websites' servers are operated outside Korea, making crackdown difficult, and the punishment level is low. Under the Copyright Act, a person charged with copyright infringement may be imprisoned for up to five years or fined up to 50 million won -- or both. 

Korean webtoon platforms, including Naver Webtoon, won a lawsuit for 1 billion won each against a person named Heo, who operated pirated webtoons and adult video streaming site Night Rabbit, but haven’t yet received compensation.   

Some major Korean webtoon platforms have started fighting piracy by implementing advanced technologies.

Naver Webtoon has introduced artificial intelligence-powered Toon Radar to identify and block first-time pirates. The technology doesn’t guarantee piracy prevention but slows the time it takes for the original episodes to be posted on illegal content-sharing sites.

Naver Webtoon said it has saved 200 billion-300 billion won per year by delaying the illegal distribution of its popular webtoons.

Kakao Entertainment Corp., mobile platform giant Kakao Corp.’s unit and the operator of Kakao Webtoon, formed a task force team to crack down on domestic and overseas pirating sites in 2021. The team has uncovered 9.2 million cases of copyright infringements and blocked 7,000 search keywords to date.

Write to Seung-Woo Lee at leeswoo@hankyung.com

Jihyun Kim edited this article.