South Korea’s long-running fight against webtoon piracy is running into the same obstacle over and over: the sites it blocks simply reopen somewhere else. New figures handed to the National Assembly show that the overwhelming majority of copyright-related blocking actions in recent years have been aimed not at new offenders, but at replacement versions of sites that regulators had already shut off.
More than 16,000 requests aimed at replacement sites
According to data the Korea Communications Standards Commission submitted to Democratic Party lawmaker Jung-ah Hwang on September 27, the body issued 24,297 corrective-action requests to block access to copyright-infringing material between 2023 and August 2026. Of that total, 16,390 cases “” roughly 67.5 percent “” concerned services that had changed their web addresses or spun up mirror sites after being blocked.
Broken down by year, the replacement-site requests numbered 6,236 in 2023, 5,771 in 2024 and 1,877 in 2025, before climbing again to 2,506 in the first eight months of 2026. The rebound in 2026 suggests that the drop recorded in 2025 did not represent a lasting retreat by pirate operators so much as a lull between address changes.
The same data also highlights what regulators have not done. Despite the tens of thousands of blocking requests, no copyright infringement cases were referred to investigative agencies for criminal inquiry, and no related materials were handed over to them. In other words, the response has remained almost entirely administrative: cut off the address, wait for the next one, cut that off too.
A faster blocking system “” and an immediate test
The government has acknowledged that speed is the core problem. In May, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism rolled out a new blocking framework aimed specifically at piracy sites, describing it as a way to “significantly improve response speed” and calling it the most effective administrative tool available at present. The logic is straightforward: if a mirror can appear within days, the countermeasure has to move in days rather than weeks.
That system was tested almost immediately. Newtoki, widely regarded as the largest illegal webtoon and web novel site operating in Korea, shut down just before the new measures took effect. Within days, however, a site carrying the Newtoki branding reappeared online. A domain operating under the Newtoki name remains reachable, its numbered address a plain illustration of how the cycle works: each block produces a new number, and the audience follows.
Why this matters for the webtoon business
Webtoons are one of Korea’s most successful cultural exports, and the vertical-scroll format is unusually easy to scrape and republish. Titles are serialized chapter by chapter, often free-to-read with paid early access, which means pirate sites can undercut the exact revenue window that publishers depend on. Losses land on platforms and, ultimately, on the creators whose per-chapter income is tied to paid views.
The pressure comes at a moment when the industry is already restructuring. Kakao Entertainment, for instance, recently announced it would fold Tapas and Kakao Webtoon into KakaoPage, consolidating its services into a single platform “” a move that underscores how tight margins have become in the digital comics space, both at home and overseas.
The figures submitted to Hwang’s office do not propose a fix, but they do sharpen the question facing regulators. Blocking is fast, cheap and repeatable, yet the data indicates that two out of every three blocking actions are effectively repeat work on a target that has already been addressed once. Without criminal referrals or action against operators themselves, the practical ceiling on enforcement appears to be how quickly the state can chase domain changes.
The underlying data was reported by Yonhap News Agency.
Featured image: YNA (Hyung-bin Park)
Source: Anime News Network