One of the biggest web novel piracy sites has been taken down after the operator’s arrest during an operation carried out by both South Korea and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). It was recently reported that the country’s most major web novel piracy distributor was taken down on December 19, 2023.
The Korean newspaper Hankyung reported that the website owner’s house was raided, and tons of materials were taken, with nearly 27,000 web novels illegally hosted. This joint operation was held by the American DHS and the South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism’s Copyright Commission. The unnamed site used to have approximately 21.7 million users in 2023 and earned almost $260,000 simply by offering advertisements.
Many believe that the DHS was brought in because the site owned a server that was carrying out operations from abroad. Due to the efforts of both teams, they were successfully able to trace the site to Korea and discovered that it had been conducting business by presenting itself as a review website. The website’s users could access reviews for a web novel and were then given some download links. The director of the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism said:
"Web novels are growing rapidly. We will work harder on related investigations to ensure that the webtoon industry does not shrink due to the distribution of illegal works.
It has been estimated that the site cost the industry almost $38 million. This arrest came after a report was published by KBS earlier this month, claiming that the famous publisher Kakao Entertainment had identified the owners responsible for the world’s most major manga and webtoon piracy site. The site dubbed “M” was predicted to have cost the industry $2.2 billion a month. The fact that both instances of mass piracy have been cracked down on in a couple of weeks indicates that South Korea takes protecting one of the world's fastest-growing art mediums seriously.
Although adaptations of manhwa and web novels such as Solo Leveling and A Returner’s Magic Should Be Special, seem to be all the rage right now, popular live-action titles like Moving, Daily Dose of Sunshine, and Perfect Marriage Revenge are examples of the way the medium is going forward in the world when it comes to more than just anime. Soon after Moving’s launch, the show scored hundreds of millions of hours watched.
