Kakao's piracy task force prevents billions of won's worth of damage to webtoonists

Kakao Entertainment prevented 265 billion won ($211 million) of potential damage to webtoonists by taking down pirated content online over the last five months, the company said in a report Tuesday.

The company, in an aim to protect its creators and the fruits of their labor, established a task force dedicated to catching pirating last November.

The team has since been searching for illegal content through search engines such as Google and Yandex and reporting them to the website manager to have them taken down. Searches were mostly done in English, Chinese and Indonesian.

Some 2.25 million webtoons that had been illegally distributed were found and taken down on numerous websites and social media platforms, according to Kakao Entertainment.

The company has also requested some 2,000 search keywords be blocked on search engines so that the search results don’t provide the users with illegal content.

“We will cover more languages in the future and take firmer action against illegal content distribution to protect the rights of creators,” Kakao Entertainment said in a statement. “We will endeavor to protect the webtoon market amid its growth on the global stage.”

Webtoon companies have been trying to tackle illegal distribution in recent years. Last October, eight webtoon companies, including Kakao Entertainment and Naver Webtoon, came together to form a coalition against illegal webtoon piracy around the world.

Damages of 549 billion won were inflicted on the local webtoon market due to webtoon piracy in 2020, according to the Korea Creative Content Agency.

BY YOON SO-YEON [yoon.soyeon@joongang.co.kr]