South Korea online piracy is a concern in the industry. Several websites, which appear to be unregulated by authorities, sell pirated movies, music, software, and other items for dirt cheap.

Online Piracy hitting South Korea hard

In 2017, the Korea Copyright Protection Agency (KCOPA) produced a report on copyright protection that found that piracy cost the music, film, broadcasting, publishing, and game sectors 2.4 trillion won ($2.2 billion).

South Korea spends approximately £12.7 million ($18 million) a year enforcing copyright laws, according to the UK’s Intellectual Property Office, one of the highest numbers of any country in the world. However, it appears that most of this effort has been in vain.

Webhards and Online Piracy

Webhards (web hard drives), a unique sort of local file sharing site renowned for its veneer of legality, ease of access, and charging money for supplying other people’s stolen content, account for a significant portion of South Korea’s internet piracy.

Webhards are legally designated as “Special Online Service Providers,” with 65 of them registered with the Ministry of Science and ICT as of February 2018.

Visiting a webhard is like entering a massive intellectual property illicit market. Everything, notably video content, pornography, and software, is for sale, and almost nothing is licensed.

Webhard’s services are extremely efficient. Users may sign up for an account and pay around $10 to get enough points to download somewhere between 200 and 600 terabytes of stuff. Some have limited connections with big media sites, while others, such as Kakaotalk, let users log in using their social network identities.

Webhards accounted for 15.6 percent of internet piracy in 2016, according to the KCOPA research, with around 334 million files trafficked. Webhards had a 22.9 percent share of pirated traffic when it came to movies.

“Platform providers are in a position to most effectively protect copyright, so they are required to take indirect responsibility.” Park Mi-kyeong of the Ministry of Culture, Sport, and Tourism told Korea Exposé.

“technological measures, etc. that block illegal forwarding of the relevant work, etc. upon request from the holder of rights.” according to the law. It is unclear how vigilant each platform must be in its monitoring of illicit content.

KCOPA discovered that by neglecting to install technical changes to combat piracy, webhard providers frequently permitted the circulation of new, high-demand films.

Pirate files on webhards often have impenetrable names like “초i고호r질ㅡBLACK 펜ㅅㅓ,” a blend of Korean and Roman words and characters designed to avoid detection.

Onsist battles South Korean Online Piracy

One of the best ways to counter Digital Media Piracy is to enlist the help of Online Piracy agencies such as Onsist. Onsist has been battling online piracy for the last decade. 

Here is how Onsist has protected Lezhin Comics from South Korean online piracy.

‘Stop Losing Your Revenue to Piracy’ has always been the motto of Onsist, using advanced automated tools to report and takedown illegal online videos such as popular movies or tv series, helping streamers to go back to the source of the contents. 

The vision of Onsist has always been to protect brands from all over the world against online theft and piracy. Onsist wants people not to fear losing their content to pirates, counterfeiters and other digital threats. 

Onsist finds and removes illegal copies of your content and protects your revenue with anti-piracy protection.

Find Infringements

Find pirated content in three ways

• Monitoring Engines

Anti-Piracy Engines that will crawl the web for infringements 24/7

• Piracy Database

A database of scraped piracy sites for easy content detection

• Trained Experts

Experts to manually reach places a bot cannot

Remove Them

Report and remove content when it’s found

• Send Out Notices

Illegal content is reported to the infringing sites

• Contact hosting

Hosting providers will be notified of infringements

• Clean up search engines

Google, Bing, and other search engines will be cleaned

Report The Results

Get notified of findings and removals

• Live Statistics

Get live feedback on found and reported infringements

• Detailed Results

Check out the status of each and every URL that’s found

• Weekly Reports

Receive weekly reports on what’s been found and removed