Government efforts to block the illegal distribution of K-content are steadily producing results. Authorities shut down illegal sites operating in Vietnam and arrested their Vietnamese operators, while a Korean who laundered his nationality was arrested in Japan and repatriated to Korea. The "emergency blocking" system, in effect since last month, has also been shown to be working.
The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism said Monday that, through a joint international investigation with Vietnam's Ministry of Public Security, it had shut down three Vietnamese sites that illegally distributed Korean webtoons and other content and arrested two site operators of Vietnamese nationality.
The suspects, a married couple, were found to have translated Korean webtoons into English and distributed them without authorization to users worldwide across Asia, North America and Europe through these sites since January 2023. A total of around 14,700 webtoons were illegally distributed across the three sites, of which Korean webtoons accounted for about 70 percent. The total number of annual visitors was analyzed at 1.105 billion, with total annual damages reaching approximately 207.2 billion won. The ministry is also examining whether it is possible to repatriate the suspects to Korea for punishment and to recover their criminal proceeds in Korea.
"Until now, illegal sites had been difficult to punish because they were based overseas," a ministry official said. "This achievement is a successful case of the government and private companies cooperating to jointly respond to overseas sites."
Earlier, on Sunday, the ministry, together with the Ministry of Justice, succeeded in repatriating a Japanese national identified only as A, 37, who operated an illegal pirated comics sharing site. This marks the first case of repatriating a criminal of Japanese nationality under the extradition treaty Korea signed with Japan in 2002. Originally a Korean national, A left for Japan in 2017 and was naturalized as a Japanese citizen in 2022.
A is currently accused of operating a pirated comics sharing site targeting Koreans from 2015 to 2022 while residing in Japan. He was found to have illegally posted some 1,400 copyrighted works of famous comics, including "Slam Dunk," "One Piece" and "Detective Conan," on the site. The content industry estimated that A operated a well-known illegal site for eight years, from 2018 to April 2026, causing at least 4.7808 trillion won in damages to the domestic webtoon and web novel industries.
Meanwhile, the ministry's "emergency blocking" system, which took effect on May 11, has been shown to be helping the domestic comics sector as illegal sites are immediately shut down. "Since the emergency blocking system took effect, sales at legal sites have increased and creators are also benefiting," a webtoon platform official said.
