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Over 200 million instances of digital piracy removed in 2023 by webtoon giant Tapas' parent company

The Tapas Entertainment owner is cracking down on piracy, hard

Tapas
Image credit: Tapas
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News by Tiffany Babb Contributing writer
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Piracy is a big issue for online publishers like Kakao Entertainment's subsidiary Tapas Entertainment, which focuses on publishing webcomics and web novels. For publishers that make their money off of clicks and microtransaction coins, having the same content being uploaded elsewhere for free on the same day without the owners' permission can have longterm consequences to the viability of the industry. That's why it's no surprise that the corporations involved in web-focused publishing are cracking down on online piracy.

Today, Kakao Entertainment's Illegal Distribution Response Team (also known as P.CoK) released their fourth whitepaper focusing on their work combatting digital piracy. P.CoK (a name inspired by the eyes on a peacock's feathers) have managed, in this past year, to exponentially increase illegal content removal through developing new methods in their efforts against piracy including new ways of identifying illegal operators, setting up cross-border responses, as well as raising awareness of these issues among both creators of web-based content and the users.

Chart showing illegal content removal count by white paper
Image credit: P.CoK

According to P.CoK's white paper, between June and December 2023, the group has blocked approximately 208 million "instances of illegal content." The "direct removal" in the chart above refers to illegal content taken down following direct warning issued by P.Cok, while "link removal count" refers to the total number of illegal content pulled as a result of tracking and addressing domains and deleted websites.

The group has also been regularly sharing a Copyright Protection Notification Letter with creators, outlining the results of the team's work and moving towards the group's goal of "minimizing the material and emotional hardship suffered by creators caused by illegal distribution of their content."

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