Webtoon Targets 170 Pirate Domains Through DMCA Subpoena

It's also user generated content. So it's akin to the OnlyFans "mirrors" or Pateron "mirrors". It's absolutely taking money away from creators and I'm totally okay with the action against the operators.

I'll play a bit of a devils advocate here. One could argue that if a product is never properly made available commercially in a region, then from a moral —but not necessarily legal— perspective it shouldn't be entitled to any copyright protection as it was never available. Piracy is also distraction for the real issues facing that industry.

The rising popularity of anime/manga in the west is significantly linked to the consumption of pirated media content released by scanlation/fansub groups. Even Crunchyroll —a site that is relatively new and brought about more legal viewing options than ever— started as a piracy site.

While nowadays there are more commercial options than a few niche players who only bring over a small sampling of series, it still is a fact that overwhelmingly most anime/manga prior to 2010 is and was never commercially available in multiple regions. In the regions it was available many products were also only partially available or heavily bowdlerized.

I feel the entire anime/manga industry is sitting on a gold mine and is too focused on blaming piracy, where the real issue is the lack of true availability for many titles. Instead of focusing on piracy they would be more successful in; doing something about Sony having a near monopoly on distribution of the entire industry's content in the west, crack down on bad localization bowdlerizing their series, and work on translating and distributing their older content.

Korean Webtoon/Manwha companies have the same identical issues faced by the Japanese Anime/Manga industries, but they are much more heavy handed with enforcement. Often to the point of unreasonableness, like going after technology neutral applications that serve legal purposes.

It's a Korean company selling webtoons.

Recently another Korean publisher Kakao killed the open source manga reader Tachiyomi.

I wish Hell Joseon would just keep to itself. I wouldn't even miss Samsung at this point to be honest.

The Korean publishers are sensationally bad at reaching external audiences. They have themselves to blame for leaving a vast market opportunity practically untapped. My experience of the Naver and similar apps is that their tardy, mediocre, abandoned, or outright nonexistent official translations are eclipsed by the timely and often very good fan/pirate scanlations, the readers they provide range from janky to abysmal, their content delivery is globally unreliable, discovery is a joke, and licensing a digital asset in the original Korean is almost impossible for the average international user due to insularity of their commerce and delivery systems.

Several times I’ve licensed content via the Naver app, in order to support the manhwaga, but then read it via a scanlation service because the user experience and translation is so much better. The pirates often have better recommendations, too.

When customers have no channel available for purchase whatsoever, or the channel is painfully sub-standard, or creates insurmountable barriers, it’s hardly surprising that enterprising buccaneers fill the gap.

A classic case of “piracy is a service problem”, and throwing the DMCA around isn’t going to make them any more money.