Kakao Entertainment’s head of the IP legal team, Park Jeon-Sung (romanization not confirmed), spoke about the company’s process and progress in cracking down on illegal webtoon and web novel distribution in a new interview with Dailian.
As the head of the IP legal team, Park oversees the anti-piracy unit, P.CoK, described as Kakao Entertainment’s “elite team of experts leading the charge in the fight against digital piracy.” Speaking to Dailian, Park said, “When Kakao Entertainment confirms a specific site is infringing on its property and needs to be shut down, it responds through a four-step process. The information we obtain through the four-step process contains various clues and patterns, so it is essential to establish hypotheses and verify them, not just through mechanical analysis. I believe the know-how and experience accumulated here is what differentiates us from the responses of domestic and foreign content companies.“
In 2023, Kakao shared some of the tools it uses to combat piracy, including “watermarking, image recognition, and usage pattern analysis.” It has a multilingual team to discover what their titles are being illegally distributed as in different countries, stating that “Content pirates often change the name of a title and hide it away in private, invite-only communities, often using multiple names,” which may suggest that they’re also entering these communities.
Companies employing similar watermarking actions include Toho and Aniplex, which watermarked Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen episodes set for streaming distribution to catch X accounts sharing them on social media before the streaming time actually lifted. They then filed subpoena requests against X to get identifying information on the accounts. WEBTOON also embeds invisible information in its releases, which it identifies through its proprietary Toon Radar technology.
Park adds that P.CoK also targets infringement of derivative works (e.g., merchandise), arguing that if an IP’s global expandability and business potential is consumed in advance, it could undermine the sustainability of the content industry itself.
Just weeks after the operator of the major webtoon and web novel piracy site Ajitun was again sentenced to 2 years in prison and a ~$50k fine, Park had this to say about the law’s current effectiveness:
“There are legal mechanisms to punish copyright infringement, but the level of punishment for operators of illegal websites is low, and the site blocking measures are easily nullified, and the problem continues to be raised. It is necessary to introduce a punitive damages system and strengthen the system for recovering criminal proceeds by improving the Copyright Act and the Information and Communications Network Act.“
Kakao Entertainment is one of Korea’s biggest webtoon and web novel distributors. It distributes major titles like Solo Leveling, Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke’s Mansion, Doctor Elise, A Returner’s Magic Should Be Special, Latna Saga, and more through KakaoPage and its English-language platform, Tapas. Kakao Entertainment’s parent company, Kakao Corporation, also oversees the Japanese-language platform, Piccoma, the highest-grossing digital manga or comics service in 2023, per the company’s statement to Korea Economic Daily.
In addition to the above anti-piracy tools, Kakao Entertainment also makes extensive use of Google’s DMCA takedown forms — to the magnitude of 100s of millions of takedown requests (ranked 6th worldwide, December 2024). You can check out the number of URLs reported for takedown and the copyright claimants below. It requested a massive 7.4 million URLs to be taken down in a single day (April 29, 2024).
Most recent data from April 7, 2025, saw it report 2.2 million URLs. You can also check out Kakao Entertainment’s annual anti-piracy whitepapers. The latest sixth edition (not public yet) was released this February, documenting how Kakao Entertainment has added a comprehensive response system for web novels. As first announced last year, it’s now a member of Google’s Trusted Copyright Removal Program (TCRP) partnership, letting it streamline the process of deindexing thousands (in theory, hundreds of thousands) of pages in bulk (Google).
Kakao Entertainment also employs lawsuits as well as cease & desist letters, as seen when it brought down the popular open-source manga reader, Tachiyomi.
Source: Dailian
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