Kakao Entertainment’s anti-piracy unit P.CoK (Protecting the Content of Kakao Entertainment) released an interview with the formerly major webtoon and web novel piracy site, Reaper Scans, which was shut down at Kakao Entertainment’s instruction. This was published as part of the company’s seventh whitepaper, summarizing its progress and challenges in countering piracy.
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The interview was held with a Reaper Scans translator after Kakao Entertainment issued the site a Cease and Desist letter earlier this year. They discussed motivations for providing webtoon and web novel fan translations, such as the limited number of officially localized versions and low-quality translations, and Kakao posed questions aimed at capturing how it built its community, the decisions behind story selections, the legality of their actions, and what is necessary to eliminate piracy. You can read the full interview here. The circumstances behind how the interview came to happen are unclear.
In the whitepaper, Kakao Entertainment also speaks with a copyright attorney, who recommends that Korea goes after overseas CDN providers and implement a dynamic injunction system, where an illegal website and all of its offspring and mirrors can be quickly added to a blocklist rather than going through a longer process. This is also being discussed in the United States with Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren’s Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA). AI anti-piracy tools were also discussed, such as those being developed in Japan, as well as methods to promote story creators in order to build a connection between fans, thus promoting legal reading.
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There’s also a conversation with Interpol investigator Hong Sung-jin, who received an award for his efforts in copyright protection last year, notably vowing to make pirates “pay the price.” He emphasizes international cooperation. Finally, interviews with undercover informants were published; tipoffs from informants and OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) methods are among the core ways that Kakao Entertainment identifies pirate sites and shuts them down. A new report was recently published into how Japan’s leading anti-piracy organization uses OSINT and white hat hackers to crack down on anime piracy.
Before Reaper Scans’ shutdown on May 9, 2025, the site amassed nearly 37 million visits in the three months prior. Kakao Entertainment is one of Korea’s biggest webtoon and web novel publishers, and serializes some of the most popular titles from other publishers, including Solo Leveling. It says that it shut down 7 webtoon piracy sites and 4 web novel sites in the first half of 2025.
Source: Kakao Entertainment Whitepaper (English summary), via P.CoK X (formerly Twitter)
© DUBU (REDICE STUDIO), Chugong, h-goon 2018 / D&C MEDIA
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