Major comics piracy hubs in South Korea are shutting down. Here’s how it happened

SEOUL - It has been a brutal few months for readers of pirated South Korean comics and manga.

On April 27, Newtokki, a major illegal webtoon site in South Korea, abruptly shut down. In a notice posted on its website, the operators said the platform would go dark by midnight and that all user data would be deleted.

They added that they had no plans to revive the service and warned that any future site using a similar name would not be affiliated with them.

Newtokki ran alongside two affiliated sites operated by the same owners: Manatokki, which carried pirated Japanese manga, and Booktokki, which hosted unauthorised copies of web novels.

The piracy powerhouse was notoriously quick to upload raw chapters after their official release. Overseas users frequently scraped fresh uploads from the site, translated them into other languages and reuploaded the files onto piracy platforms abroad.

According to the traffic analytics firm SimilarWeb, the site drew about 126 million visits in March alone; a 2024 industry estimate placed the damage to the South Korean web comics sector from Newtokki at roughly 39.8 billion won (S$34 million).

Newtokki’s closure came just weeks after the takedown of another major piracy operation overseas.

In March, TuMangaOnline, also known as ZonaTMO, went offline after Spain’s National Police raided a home in Almeria and arrested three suspects.

The website had been the dominant destination for Spanish-speaking manga and webtoon readers, logging about 86 million visits in March 2025, according to figures cited by South Korean rights holders.

Although TuMangaOnline was best known for hosting pirated Japanese manga, it also carried large volumes of South Korean webtoons.

In a statement on April 27, Naver Webtoon and Kakao Entertainment said they had played a central role in the takedown, working through the Copyright Overseas Promotion Association, a Seoul-based body that represents South Korean publishers in cross-border copyright cases.

Shift in tactics

The recent shutdowns reflect a broader shift in tactics as South Korean platforms began to take matters into their own hands.

South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has grown more vocal about piracy in recent months, pushing through legislation that allows regulators to block illegal sites without a review process.

However, government action alone has clear limits in confronting an industry that operates beyond its borders.

Copyright infringement is, in most jurisdictions, a complaint-based crime, leaving the burden of identifying operators and gathering evidence largely on rights holders themselves. Piracy networks are also extensively decentralised, with servers often hosted in countries where copyright enforcement is weak or cooperation is slow.

For years, South Korean publishers tried to fight foreign piracy sites through international copyright treaties, a process that often led nowhere.

That is why the publishers have shifted to a more hands-on approach in recent years. Rather than working from afar, copyright holders are now forming task forces that engage directly with local law firms, investigators and law enforcement in the countries where the operators are based.

The TuMangaOnline case offers a window into how that works.

Representatives of the major South Korean webtoon publishers spent months coordinating with a Spanish law firm and a global anti-piracy firm to assemble the case. Their findings were then turned over to Spanish police, who carried out the raid in Almeria and made the arrests.

The same pattern played out in January, when Bato.to, then one of the most-visited manga and webtoon piracy sites, shut down after its alleged operator was arrested in China.

Kakao Entertainment is said to have played a major role in the broader pressure campaign, while the Japanese anti-piracy group CODA – which represents manga publishers Kadokawa, Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan and Square Enix – drove the criminal referral in China itself, working with a Chinese investigative firm to identify the suspect and filing a complaint with the local authorities.

There is reason to believe the tightening international net contributed to Newtokki’s shutdown.

One of the site’s three operators is reported to have acquired Japanese citizenship in 2022 to evade the South Korean authorities, and South Korean web comics companies had previously struggled to secure cooperation from Japanese counterparts in pursuing them.

Major Japanese manga publishers have grown more proactive in cross-border enforcement through their industry body, as the Bato case showed.

Cooperation has also broadened at the government level: At a summit in Nara earlier in 2026, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi agreed to expand cooperation on intellectual property protection.

Tech and timing

Companies are also shoring up their own defences, leaning on new technology and rethinking how titles are released.

Naver Webtoon, for one, has rolled out an in-house tool named Toon Radar that embeds invisible watermarks in each chapter. When a pirated copy turns up online, the watermark allows the company to trace it back to the specific account that downloaded it.

In a report in March, the company said the technology has cut the number of titles leaked within 24 hours of release by about 90 per cent, and lifted paid transactions for affected works by an average of 23 per cent.

Publishers have also begun releasing South Korean and translated editions of select titles simultaneously, eliminating the gap that has long pushed international fans toward unauthorised translations.

The move is in line with a longstanding industry observation that piracy is often less about price than access – readers turn to bootlegs when they cannot legally read new chapters at the same time as local audiences. THE KOREA HERALD/ASIA NEWS NETWORK