SEOUL, August 13 (AJP) - Korean authorities have taken down three North Africa-based piracy sites accused of illegally distributing tens of thousands of Korean webtoons and web novels, following a cross-border investigation involving Interpol and Naver Webtoon.
The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the National Police Agency said Thursday that one site operator was arrested locally and all three platforms were shut down as part of the joint operation.
The case marks a shift in Korea's approach to piracy overseas — moving beyond blocking orders and takedown requests toward criminal investigations that target operators themselves, rather than only removing access to the sites they run.
It follows a similar international cooperation case in Vietnam earlier this year, part of what officials describe as an expanding push to pursue K-content piracy networks through public-private cooperation.
The three sites included one dedicated to webtoons, one dedicated to web novels and a third platform that shared pirated material sourced from the other two.
Operating since July 2024, the network had copied and distributed 83,688 pieces of copyrighted content without authorization, according to the ministry. The total included 30,926 items tied to Korean webtoons and 5,202 tied to web novels, among them recent popular titles such as “The Trauma Code.”
Korean content made up roughly 57 percent of everything on the sites, and industry estimates put the resulting annual damage at around 20 billion won ($14.5 million).
What made the sites especially damaging, authorities said, is that they functioned as first-stage distributors: pirating paid content from official platforms, translating it into English and posting it online at the first stage of illegal distribution.
From there, the material can be copied and re-uploaded across a wider network of mirror and repost sites, meaning the true scale of damage could extend beyond what these three platforms alone accounted for.
The investigation began in March, after Naver Webtoon flagged the network through its own in-house piracy monitoring.
The culture ministry then opened an international cooperation channel through Interpol's I-SOP project, coordinating with the National Police Agency's international cooperation bureau, an I-SOP liaison officer based in Singapore and a Korean police attaché stationed in North Africa.
Working with local law enforcement, the joint team shut down all three sites in mid-July and arrested the suspected operator, identified by authorities only by an alias, on the ground.
The takedown is the first international case announced by the ministry's Copyright Special Judicial Police Division, a unit launched on June 30.
The ministry said it will keep coordinating with local authorities as legal proceedings against the operator move forward and plans to expand similar cooperation against copyright infringement elsewhere in the region.
For Korea's webtoon and web novel industry, the case underscores a growing enforcement challenge: as K-content draws bigger audiences overseas, the networks that illegally translate and redistribute it are also becoming faster, more organized and harder to contain within any one country's borders.
AJP Takeaway:
- South Korea shut down three North Africa-based piracy sites accused of illegally distributing Korean webtoons, web novels and other copyrighted content.
- The sites copied and distributed 83,688 pieces of content since July 2024, including 30,926 Korean webtoon items and 5,202 web novel items.
- Korean content made up about 57 percent of the material on the sites, with industry-estimated annual damage of around 20 billion won.
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