No matter where people live or how much knowledge and experience they’ve accumulated, governments and corporations rarely shy away from an opportunity to offer behavioral advice.

Delivered via TV, radio and the internet, public service announcements enlighten the masses on topics seemingly so complex, they’re only fully understood by the few. Even if that was the case, 30 seconds of theatrics followed by what amounts to a blind order may have worked 40 years ago; today, people expect more than that and when it comes to anti-piracy PSAs, magnitudes more.

For the last few years the global anti-piracy message hasn’t wavered for a moment. There’s no memorable slogan to recall, but the message couldn’t be clearer: If people pirate content, using IPTV services in particular, more likely than not they will become infected with malware, have their identities stolen, credit cards maxed-out, and/or bank accounts emptied.

It’s one of the strongest and most united messages ever sent, and with multiple and significant caveats, even has some basis in truth. It appears to have done little to suppress demand, however.

Whether events unfolding in South Korea will dampen local demand remains to be seen, but the narrative playing out on national news could hardly be worse for pirate sites.

Piracy and Illegal Gambling Start Sharing a Cell

Before the advent of various international schemes that prevent gambling companies from advertising on pirate sites or contain an abstention agreement, gambling ads and pirate site were commonly seen together.

In South Korea, the government is no fan of piracy, but it tolerates illegal gambling even less. Online gambling within South Korea is outlawed, and government control in the rest of the market effectively amounts to a lucrative monopoly. When pressure mounted on former local piracy site Noonoo TV , the existence of ads promoting illegal gambling on the site receive dozens of mentions in the media.

While Noonoo seems to be dead, the local piracy/gambling nexus is reportedly in full swing. With black market gambling reportedly worth up to $80 billion, national TV news channel KBS has run dozens of stories over the past couple of months, all with a common theme.

Enjoy the Movie, Stay For the Gambling

The story at the heart of the current controversy dates back to September; KBS published a video report (below, English translation via subtitle) in which the presenter explains (around the one-minute mark) that the channel’s reporters tested out an illegal streaming site offering Netflix content for free. When a reporter clicked on one of the ads, it led to a surprisingly open criminal who confirmed the channel’s suspicions, apparently with no hesitation.

“When I click on the advertising banner on the screen, I am taken directly to an online gambling site. On other illegal streaming sites, similar advertisements appear on the screen,” the presenter says.

“After checking them one by one, most of them were the same company. A reporter contacted the online gambling operator and asked if he had anything to do with the streaming site, and he answered ‘yes’. So, it appears that they are making money by offering free OTT services and luring users who are misled by them to gambling sites,”

Commenting on the allegations, police confirmed an investigation into the connections between gambling sites and pirate streaming portals, adding that accounts linked to five sites had been frozen, with two sites shut down.

“The problem with these illegal OTTs and the gambling sites connected to them,” the presenter adds, “is that even teenagers are exposed to them without protection.”

Teenage Gambling Addicts

How KBS identified and then obtained permission to interview school kids who used these sites isn’t clear. The channel disguised their voices and blurred out their faces, but there’s little to hide their naivety. One of the opening statements appears to show a lack of understanding, if not complete ignorance, of exactly the type of disclosure that can ruin people’s lives.

“Even though I was a minor, I signed up immediately after entering my name, date of birth, and phone number, and that’s how I started ‘gambling’,” a student revealed.

“I was trying to watch it for free, but a lot of windows appeared at the bottom and a window at the top,” added another.

“While watching a free movie on an illegal OTT site, I inadvertently saw an advertisement. I clicked and entered the gambling site,” the interviewer was told.

“At first, out of curiosity, I went to the gambling site. The money I sent later grew out of control, and I even resorted to private loans.”

The final horror story manages to sound even more miserable than the others.

“This year I earned about 10 million won [US7,600],” the student said. “I originally saved up the money by doing a part-time job. But my mother and her parents had to give luxury goods and gold, and I took all of the collateral, because the interest rates on the losses jumped 100% in three days.”

Video From Inside an Alleged Gambling/Pirate Site Operation

KBS News doesn’t reveal who provided the video, but it was allegedly recorded inside an office where a gambling operation was based. The channel says it shows both the gambling platform and the pirate site being operated from the same room, enough evidence for the channel to conclude direct links between pirate movies and TV shows, and illegal gambling.

“There are adult sites and drama-watching sites. Those are the ones that work best,” a company official explained.

“These days, [gambling] sites don’t work without kids.”

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Machine apparently identified man inspecting it as one of the boxes it was stacking

A robot crushed a man to death in South Korea after the machine apparently failed to differentiate him from the boxes of produce it was handling, the Yonhap news agency reported on Wednesday.

The man, a robotics company worker in his 40s, was inspecting the robot’s sensor operations at a distribution centre for agricultural produce in South Gyeongsang province.

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DMCA subpoena applications filed at courts in the United States provide a relatively inexpensive mechanism for compelling intermediaries to hand over the personal details of allegedly-infringing users.

Since Cloudflare offers reverse proxy services to websites as part of its free tier, most subpoena applications filed in the United States target the company. They typically seek disclosure of pirate site operators’ personal details, and it’s not uncommon to see a dozen domains feature in one application or more in a bundle filed at the same time.

As revealed in our report last month , South Korea’s Naver Webtoon filed a single application containing over 350 ‘pirate’ domains, easily the highest number we’ve seen in recent years, possibly the most ever.

After remaining silent for several months, late last week Naver Webtoon issued a press release. It claimed that after obtaining the subpoena and taking unspecified action, the company “halted the activities of 150 overseas illegal sites.”

That’s an eye-catching figure because in many cases Cloudflare has little useful information to pass on. It also represents a level of success currently enjoyed by no other rightsholders using the same process, which is highly unusual. That alone warrants a closer look but first, a brief summary of key statements in the release.

Naver Webtoon’s Key Statements

– After three months of hard work by Naver Webtoon, about 150 overseas illegal sites stopped operating. This is the result of Naver Webtoon’s action to issue a ‘Subpoena’ through a U.S. court, the first in the webtoon industry.

– Illegal site operator information, such as address, email, and payment details, is essential information for tracking and arrest. Subpoenas also have the effect of discouraging the activities of illegal site operators.

– According to the traffic statistics site ‘Similar Web’, the annual user traffic to about 150 illegal sites affected by Naver Webtoon’s action is approximately 2.5 billion.

– Naver Webtoon plans to share the information on illegal site operators obtained this time with investigative agencies and respond strictly with a zero-tolerance policy.

Right off the bat it’s worth highlighting that the subpoena listed 360 domain names, not 360 sites. To illustrate why that’s so important, one of the sites targeted appears to have begun life as ‘Newtoki’ but then registered subsequent domains that also include a number; newtoki1, newtoki2, newtoki3, etc.

A total of 19 of these variants appeared in the subpoena, as low as newtoki17.org and as high as newtoki310.com. There appears to be at least another 100 domains in a similar format, hundreds in total (some apparently owned by an anti-piracy company), but none functioning as a pirate site. Persistence may have paid off here, but there are nearly always more domains than sites and that can significantly distort perceived outcomes.

That being said, a bigger and perhaps more straightforward win may justify the campaign in its own right.

Closure of Just One Site Suggests Campaign Paid Off

Aquamanga.com was one of two sites mentioned specifically by Naver Webtoon following its press release last week.

Traffic to Aquamanga was significant to say the least. SimilarWeb data reveals a site receiving considerable traffic on an upwards trajectory; 61 million visits in September, up from 52.6m in July.

We’ve seen no evidence to show the site has reappeared under a different domain, and information suggests that the deterrent effect mentioned by Naver Webtoon may have done its job in this case. Overall, the closure of Aquamanga seems to be the highlight of the campaign and since it accounts for three quarters of a billion visits, understandably so.

Another Big Closure But Less Satisfactory Outcome

Another site that received a direct mention from Naver was Flamescans.org. The popular scanlation site was also doing well; SimilarWeb data for August and September shows between 18.1m and 18.7m visits per month, progress that was halted when the site suddenly went offline.

“Thank you to all of our community members for their continued support. Unfortunately, this site has discontinued all services related to the function and content hosted as of October 19, 2023. We appreciate your steadfast engagement and commitment to us through the years,” a notice on the homepage reads.

While the quality of the ‘artwork’ accompanying the goodbye message won’t keep Webtoon’s artists up at night, it strongly implies that things might not be over just yet.

The image above shows Flamescans to the left of the goodbye message and Flame-Comics to the right. They appear identical and show that while domains are important, they’re not as important as sites.

Interestingly, a bitcoin address on the Flamescans.org domain marked “Anonymous Donations” has received a total of 0.00000000 BTC ($0.00) thus far. It’s possible that pirate frugality and relatively complicated crypto transactions aren’t the best mix.

Also listed in the subpoena but still online are five ‘Agitoon’ .xyz domains beginning agit571 and ending agit577.xyz. They carry the same epilepsy-inducing gambling advertising previously seen on the now-shuttered Noonoo TV .

Naver Webtoon says that in addition to sending direct warnings to “selected” illegal sites, it also works to undermine their ability to do business. Domain registrars, hosting companies, ISPs, social media platforms and payment services are among the potential targets.

Due to these efforts, 23 unnamed sites witnessed a 30% fall in traffic in October when compared to July, the company reports.

‘Good News’ For the Entire Webtoon Industry

Summing up, Naver Webtoon says that its anti-piracy work isn’t just good for the company, it’s good for everyone involved in webtoons.

“This achievement is helpful not only to Naver Webtoon but also to the entire webtoon industry, which is suffering damage from illegal webtoon sites,” says Kim Gyu-nam, Naver Webtoon’s legal affairs chief and anti-piracy task force leader.

“The platform will do its best to eradicate illegal webtoons. We will continue to actively take all possible measures.”

Given the constantly shifting nature of many pirate sites, especially those that operate multiple domains and/or move to new ones hoping to evade various measures, it’s difficult to determine whether Naver Webtoon really did shut down 150 sites. In its press release it actually notes that “about 150 sites were completely deleted or temporarily suspended operations ” which does change things somewhat.

Still, if putting domains out of action was part of the mission, that seems to have been quite effective. The image below shows a screenshot/preview image of every domain in the subpoena. In the majority of cases, those with no image are out of action.

Whether any have moved to new domains is another question, but none will have welcomed the disruption and won’t welcome the future disruption Naver Webtoon is already promising.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

The ‘Korean Wave’ cultural phenomenon, boosted by movies and TV shows such as Parasite and Squid Game, and once in a generation musical mega-groups like BTS, has captivated audiences thousands of miles beyond South Korea’s borders.

These cultural exports have overcome language barriers, generated huge sums of money, and further boosted South Korea’s image on the world stage. These are impressive accomplishments for the country’s entertainment sector but having hit the big time, the downsides of success are apparent too.

While global recognition and escalating riches are supported by healthy increases in media consumption, that attracts piracy rates typically associated with the most successful entertainment content. Not that the government or rightsholders have simply allowed that to happen, of course.

South Korea’s efforts to seriously reduce piracy were evident in 2009 when a revision of the Korean Copyright Act introduced a “three strikes” administrative program to disconnect repeat infringers from the internet. However, for the next few years, authorities focused on hosts and facilitators of infringing content instead.

Internationalized Piracy, Internationalized Response

Over the decade-and-a-half that followed, South Korea and indeed the rest of the world discovered that making content widely available at a fair price is one of the best ways to increase revenue. Yet to date, and despite increased consumption of legal content, almost nothing has been truly effective at permanently reducing headline piracy rates.

To tackle an increasingly professional and internationalized piracy market, rightsholders have been forming coalitions to fight piracy as one, with the huge Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment providing the most obvious example.

Earlier this year, South Korean rightsholders were said to be working with ACE and government officials as part of a sustained effort to take down Noonoo TV, a giant illegal streaming platform said to be particularly damaging to the local market.

The site’s collapse just weeks later may be a sign that when everyone pushes in the same direction, progress can be made against even the most difficult targets. It appears the South Korean government intends to maintain the pressure.

Determined to Protect K-Content

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST) says it has launched two new entities to strengthen the investigative capabilities of the Copyright Special Judicial Police (CSJP) to tackle the illegal distribution of K-Content.

The Copyright Crime Scientific Investigation Team reorganizes existing investigation resources into four teams, together responsible for planning and investigations, international cooperation, domestic crime, and investigation support. The Ministry says this establishes a scientific investigation system based on digital forensics to specialize and streamline investigative capabilities.

The Ministry said it will also operate a new Copyright Crime Analysis Center to investigate the illegal and increasingly sophisticated and internationalized distribution of K-Content. The center will use the latest digital forensics software, evidence replication and analysis tools, plus other equipment for “advanced criminal investigations.”

One of the goals of the new center is to overcome a reliance on previously seized materials, by developing the ability to analyze illegal sites and their distribution routes in advance. The Ministry says this will enable “rapid and dense investigations, forensic analysis, and the safety of digital evidence management.”

The center will also be used for international cooperation meetings between domestic and foreign investigative agencies and law enforcement.

Progress to Report

Over the past 12 months, the Ministry of Culture says that piracy investigations led to the arrest of four site operators and eight uploaders linked to three eBook piracy platforms. Action against streaming service BeeTV also gets a mention.

“In addition, the ministry has been stepping up its efforts to arrest copyright infringement criminals, including the arrest of three workers who operated BeeTV, an illegal IPTV piracy service, and transmitted broadcasts without authorization,” the report notes.

Other successes include the arrest of “a heavy uploader who shared domestic broadcasts and online video service (OTT) videos as torrents to mine BitTorrent coins,” and the arrest of another major uploader who earned over $101,000 by by sharing TV shows and anime on 17 local file-hosting platforms.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Survivors of the Itaewon disaster and relatives of victims continue to wrestle with unanswered questions and grief as they push for official accountability.

Launched by South Korean tech giant Naver Corporation in 2004, Webtoon gained popularity as a hosting platform for a specific type of short-form digital comic, known locally as ‘webtoons’

Almost two decades later, Webtoon Entertainment has over 85 million active users per month across more than 100 countries. In the United States, where the company now boasts 12.5 million active users, Webtoon seems destined for a public listing, potentially as soon as 2024 according to information shared by Naver during a recent earnings call.

In an August interview with Reuters, Webtoon Entertainment founder and CEO Kim Junkoo was certainly bullish on the company’s future. Rivals moving in on the short-form comic market, which include both Amazon and Apple, will struggle to build a viable business, Kim predicted.

Competitors Face Uphill Struggle

“To build a (webtoon) store, you need knowledge about serial services, user targeting, a fitting business model, educating users,” Kim told Reuters. “This takes time. But even if you put in time, you can’t recreate the creator economy we’ve built.”

Webtoon believes its artists and depth of content libraries will present significant challenges for potential Silicon Valley competitors. “If big tech is serious about this IP-creating business, they’d have to buy us out,” the company’s CEO explained.

Of course, online competition can take many forms. Unconventional market participants that have no interest in acquisition, respond differently to traditional market forces. As such, they present novel challenges that require a specialist approach.

Webtoon fully understands what it’s up against and is already considering a response. The sheer scale of the initial groundwork appears unprecedented.

The Calm Before the Storm

On an unspecified date in August 2023, in its capacity as agent for Webtoon Entertainment Inc., Texas-based anti-piracy company Remove Your Media, LLC, sent a complaint to CDN company Cloudflare.

DMCA notices can be unremarkable but here the undated document stands out as unusual. It begins with a “representative list” of copyrighted works owned by Webtoon, titles such as How To Tame My Beastly Husband, I Raised The Beast Well, Jungle Juice, and I’m Not That Kind Of Talent. However, it’s the overall number of allegedly infringed works that really catches the eye.

According to Remove Your Media, these titles and around 80 others like them were being made available for download by pirate sites, all of them utilizing Cloudflare’s services.

“The works primarily consist of animated motion pictures and digital comics published by WEBTOON,” Cloudflare was advised. “Please act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the infringing material.”

Each block in the image above represents one of the 390+ URLs listed in the Webtoon infringement notice. The blank spaces indicate URLs that no longer exist at the time of writing, wouldn’t load for unspecified reasons, or in some cases link to sites that appear to have shifted to new or alternative domains. The majority of those containing an image remain online; the question is for how long.

A Silent Trip to Texas

Over a decade ago, then-junior attorney Evan Stone made headlines when he used four-letter expletives to slam ISPs and the adult industry, while revealing his personal vendetta against pirates, or “smarmy entitled little brats” to use the attorney’s terminology.

While much has changed since then, the appearance of Stone’s name on a declaration in support of DMCA subpoena application filed at a district court in Texas, shows that his pirate-fighting days are not yet over.

With Stone representing Remove Your Media, and both acting as agents of Webtoon Entertainment, the DMCA subpoena application filed in August but only now being reported, is a strong indication that reducing illicit competition is a priority matter for the webtoon company.

Webtoon Demands Identities of Hundreds of Pirate Site Operators

The primary purpose of a DMCA subpoena is to compel a service provider, in this case Cloudflare, to hand over the personal details of an alleged infringer to allow copyright holders to enforce their rights. Here, the application demands the following:

Identifying information, including name, e-mail address, physical address, billing information and any other relevant contact information for the alleged infringer(s) who control the sites at the domains listed in Exhibit A, or control the domains themselves.

What separates this application from most is the scale of the request and the sheer volume of site operators that face being caught up in the dragnet. It’s inevitable that some domains in the list will share the same owner but over 350 domains in a single subpoena is still unprecedented, and would remain so even if reduced by half.

Strictly there’s no requirement for the clerk of the court to conduct a detailed examination of a DMCA application before issuing the stamp of approval. Given that the application was filed August 22, marked as terminated on August 22, and then issued two days later on August 24, it seems likely that no further examination took place.

The list of domains targeted in the subpoena, for which Cloudflare was required to hand over full operator details, is available below. What happens next is almost entirely down to the quality of information handed over by Cloudflare before the deadline expired on October 5. It’s likely that the information received is already undergoing evaluation.

Webtoon’s overall goal likely entails the removal of illicit competition from the market but the means remain unknown. In practical terms, not even the largest corporate entertainment giants see value in mass litigation. Even if Webtoon decided otherwise, balancing the books to make the exercise worthwhile would be complex and unpredictable at best; messy, unproductive, even counterproductive at worst.

Threats of possible litigation to encourage settlements may be considered a viable option, at least if any of the operators left any usable identifying information in Cloudflare’s hands, which most try to avoid.

______

The individual domains listed in the subpoena are shown below to illustrate scale. Due to the potential for errors following OCR and the extraction of domains from the full-content URLs in the subpoena, the list is not definitive. The DMCA takedown notice sent to Cloudflare, which contains full unedited URLs, is available here ( pdf )

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From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Why did the North expel Pvt. Travis T. King, rather than use him for its own purposes? Analysts say he was probably considered more of a burden than an asset.

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While nothing stands in the way of a single rightsholder taking on one or more pirate sites, in recent years there has been a noticeable shift towards pooling resources.

For the Hollywood studio members of the MPA, anti-piracy teamwork is nothing new, but for other members of the highly successful Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, collaborating with rival companies is likely to be a relatively new concept. In light of the growing threat posed by online piracy and few better options, it’s clearly one they’re happy to explore.

In March, South Korean broadcasters, including KBS, MBC and JTBC, the Korea Film and Video Copyright Association (film producers and distributors), plus streaming platforms TVING and Wavve, announced the formation of a similar anti-piracy coalition dedicated to protecting local content. Its connections with ACE are likely to prove invaluable.

Noonoo TV in the Crosshairs

Under Video Copyright Protection Council (이하 영보협) branding, the coalition’s immediate target was Noonoo TV, a hugely successful pirate streaming site receiving dozens of millions of visits from Koreans every month. At least in theory, an ISP blocking program should’ve prevented that from happening, but Noonoo’s deployment of dozens of new domains meant the campaign couldn’t keep up.

Surprisingly, Noonoo’s successful circumvention program was eventually self-terminated – along with the site itself – just a few weeks later. In an April announcement, the site’s operator said that the “outrageous” cost of bandwidth and “pressure on the site from all directions” had culminated in a decision to shut Noonoo down. Around April 14, Noonoo said nighty night for the last time and gave one last piece of advice before turning off the lights.

“Please be careful of impersonation sites…”

Left in no doubt that any remaining value in the Noonoo brand would be immediately extracted by opportunists, we began monitoring fresh domain registrations when the site went down. These included noonoo.app, noonootv.live, noonoo2023.xyz and noonootorrent.com in April, a whole bunch ending in .click in May, and then a couple more in early June – noonoo.art and noonoo.lol.

Initially, just one of these domains showed signs of picking up the baton but then noonoo.lol stepped on the gas and surged into the lead.

The site introduced itself as ‘Noonoo TV Season2’ on June 12. It had the same layout, most likely the same or similar content library, but more importantly, the same set of ads that appeared on the original site ( screenshot ) featuring exactly the same gambling companies.

After just four days online, the site was subjected to a large-scale DDOS attack. That was reportedly handled in 30 mins, but the site still wanted to clear something up.

“Noonoo TV Season 2 has no connection to the original Noonoo TV,” the site announced. A business address in the site’s footer claimed that a company called Digisn Mowanda was now running the site from an office in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Whether anyone plans to pay a personal visit anytime soon is unknown, but it might be best to call ahead first, just in case.

Korean Government Not Thrilled By The Resurrection

In an announcement dated June 18, the Ministry of Science and ICT said the appearance of ‘Season 2’ warranted a “strong response.”

“As the damage caused to the domestic online video service (OTT) industry and others due to the [original] illegal free streaming site ‘Noonoo Tv’ grew day by day, last year the Ministry of Science and ICT, together with the domestic online video service industry, ISPs, and the Radio Association of Korea (RAPA), persistently blocked the illegal service by shortening the frequency; such as once a week, twice a week, and once a day, leading to the termination of Noonoo TV’s service in April,” the statement reads.

“The Ministry of Science and ICT plans to actively respond to illegal online video service (OTT) distribution sites such as ‘Noonoo TV Season 2’ based on its experience and capabilities in blocking access to Noonoo TV.”

The Ministry says it has already asked the Korea Communications Commission to expedite its decision on the “illegality and copyright infringement of Noonoo TV Season 2” and once that has been received, enhanced blocking measures will be put in place to disrupt the service.

“During the response [to the original site], we were able to block access once a day, but this time, we will streamline the response system so that we can block multiple times a day,” the Ministry says.

Piracy vs. Artificial Intelligence

Alongside a promise to work closely with the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the Korea Communications Commission, and the National Security Agency to protect ‘K’ content from unlawful distribution, the Ministry of Science says the time is right to enhance manual work carried out by humans with automated systems better suited to the job.

“Since the detection and response to illegal sites is currently centered on manual work based on human resources, to overcome this limitation, we plan to develop technology that can automatically detect and verify new versions and substitute sites,” the Ministry said.

“Online video service (OTT) content is a precious asset created with the blood and sweat of many people. It’s a growth engine that will be responsible for the future of our country, so it is very important for mature citizens to refrain from using these illegal sites.”

Season 2 Ends Prematurely

Calls for citizens to act responsibly are not unusual in South Korea and in the right circumstances, can be highly effective too. However, on this occasion a national boycott of ‘Season 2’ will not be required after the following announcement (translated from original) .

On the Season 2 Telegram channel , the shutdown is yet to be mentioned.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.