Kakao Entertainment cracks down on pirated content in Indonesia

A screen capture of an Indonesian translation group "Chicken Money" which notified users that it will halt its translation services of Kakao webtoons [KAKAO ENTERTAINMENT]

Kakao Entertainment took down over 15,600 pieces of pirated content from Indonesian websites and platforms last year, it reported Monday.

The entertainment company formed a task force team in November 2021 to protect its licensed content globally.

The team blocked a total of 15,607 incidents of illegal distribution, shutdown 206 trafficking rings on Telegram and 32 online channels which illegally published and translated its webtoons in Indonesia.

Some 63 percent of web users in Indonesia pirated content, the company said. The task force is said to have infiltrated the illegal groups under the disguise of a user to identify the illegal communities using services such as Telegram and Discord.

The task force team is also censoring illegal content in Korea, North and South America and China.

From December to February, a total of 70,680 illegal distributions were blocked in China.

“The team is dedicated to monitoring and cracking down on illegally-distributed content licensed by Kakao Entertainment in all languages,” said Lee Ho-jun, the head of the task force team in a statement. “After the team was formed in 2021, it identified a total of 9.2 million illegal distributions worldwide and registered for 7,000 search keywords to be blocked on search engines [so that the search results don't provide the users with illegal content]. This year, we’re concentrating on accumulating evidence for our database to file suits against illegal sites.”

As global popularity for domestic webtoons grows, Kakao Entertainment has been working to take down its pirated content online to protect the rights of its creators and licensed content.

In November 2019, the company sued three operators of a domestic piracy site which distributed 413 Kakao webtoons without consent from June 2017 to May 2019. The court ordered the defendants to pay compensation of 1 billion won ($761,710) to the plaintiff in January 2021.

BY LEE JAE-LIM [lee.jaelim@joongang.co.kr]