Naver Webtoon, South Korea’s leading webtoon provider, presents its webtoon series during New York Comic Con held in New York on Oct. 11, 2022, in this photo provided by the company.
SEOUL, Feb. 2 (Korea Bizwire) — With the illegal sharing of web-based comics emerging as a headache, South Korean online webtoon service providers are taking different approaches to address the problem.
Naver Webtoon, an online platform for digital comics run by internet portal operator Naver Corp., is focusing on an artificial intelligence (AI)-based advance interruption system reminiscent of the 2002 Hollywood science-fiction film “Minority Report.”
If the system detects web-based comics that have been illegally copied, it extracts user identification information from the image and shuts down the account of the first leaker.
The user identification information is inserted in webtoon images but cannot be recognized visually. The method of creating and inserting the information is changed on a regular basis.
Starting in 2019, Naver Webtoon has relied on machine learning to analyze the pattern of illegal webtoon distribution and to detect suspected illegal copies.
Meanwhile, Kakao Entertainment Corp., an entertainment arm of tech giant Kakao Corp., has been monitoring and deleting illegal webtoons distributed throughout global search sites and social media.
The company’s task force team includes professional staff in charge of monitoring English, Chinese and Indonesian-speaking countries.
They play the role of monitoring illegally copied webtoons and asking posters to delete illegally translated content.
The task force team detected about 50 illegal sites in Chinese-speaking countries during the first eleven months of last year, and succeeded in deleting about 1.04 million pieces of illegal content.
The country’s illegal webtoon distribution market size was estimated at 842.7 billion won (US$691 million) in 2021, up 53.6 percent from a year earlier, according to the Korea Creative Content Agency.
J. S. Shin (js_shin@koreabizwire.com)
