Webtoon Publisher Naver Seeks Legal Action Against 160+ Piracy Sites

Naver is gearing up to fight some of the biggest webtoon and manga pirates in the game.

By Megan Peters

The company behind Webtoon is ready to take legal action against some of its top pirates. For decades, piracy lanes have targeted the manga industry, and it didn't take long for those branches to embrace webtoon. From South Korea to China and Japan, web comics have been a huge hit, and Naver has investing in the field. And after Webtoon Entertainment went public at the stock market, Naver is now preparing to take legal action against 170+ piracy sites across the globe.

As reported by a recent SEC filing, Naver and Webtoon Entertainment is looking into piracy very closely as stock prices have fallen sharply in recent weeks. You can read what the company's filing stated about the situation below:

"As the copying and distribution of content over the internet proliferates, the risk of piracy, gray market sales, illegal downloading, file-sharing or other infringement, misappropriation and other violation of our intellectual property is likely to continue to increase... We take various measures to prevent and monitor unauthorized use of our content, including developing proprietary technology to detect piracy and other technological measures."

With this SEC filing complete, Webtoon Entertainment is now interested in sourcing info on the piracy sites that are trawling its titles. A DCMS subpoena was filed by the company in Texas earlier this week asking for Cloudfare to hand over the personal details for owners overseeing a number of piracy sites. In this DCMA subpoena, 170 unique domains are listed including some of the top-visited piracy sites for manga and webtoons stateside.

"The purpose of the accompanying subpoena is to obtain the identity of the alleged copyright infringer(s) in control of the internet domain(s)/website(s) listed in the subpoena. The information obtained will be used only for the purpose of protecting the rights granted to my client," the subpoena's declaration reads.

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At this point, no word is available on this subpoena will play out, and there is no telling how Cloudfare's information may impact the accused piracy platforms. Last November, Webtoon said its action against piracy sites forced "about 150" services to shut down. But of course, the question now is whether other piracy services popped up to replace those that Naver Webtoon helped dismantle.

What do you make of this latest move against webtoon and manga piracy? Let us know what you think over on Twitter and Instagram. You can also hit me up @MeganPetersCB to share your take!

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