Korea removed 0.05% of the pirated copies of its own culture
Overseas illegal distribution of Korean content reached 493.55 million recorded instances last year, the highest since the count began in 2022, according to figures the Korea Copyright Protection Agency supplied to the National Assembly and MP Jung Joon-ho released on 12 October.
Webtoons accounted for 328.21 million of those instances, or 66.5%. Film and broadcast content made up 165.34 million, or 33.5%, a rise of 40.6% on the 117.59 million recorded the year before. The total was up 19.2% from 414.1 million in 2024.
Against that, the agency removed 243,374 illegal postings overseas during the year. That is 0.05% of the volume it detected.
Overseas illegal distribution hit a record 493.55 million recorded instances last year. Two-thirds of it was webtoons.
The number needs reading carefully. These are counts of detected illegal postings in a monitoring survey, not downloads, viewings or lost sales. The agency has said it cannot calculate the financial damage, because infringement routes differ by sector and the value of a single instance varies with unit price, genre, platform and how recently the work was released.
What the data does show cleanly is a shift in where the copying happens. English accounted for 46.6% of the languages the pirated content was translated into, down 17 percentage points, with Chinese at 20.4%, Southeast Asian languages at 15.7% and European languages at 7.6%.
Jung said the map of illegal distribution is changing fast as the English-language share falls and Southeast Asian and European markets rise, and called for more native-language monitoring staff in those markets and wider cooperation with overseas investigators.
The number of sites is growing faster than the content on them. MP Lim O-kyung released separate agency figures in September putting the estimated population of illegal distribution sites at 19,664 in 2025, up about 56% from 12,630 the year before.
New work is hit immediately. Korean content released or broadcast across 2024 and 2025 generated 81.09 million instances of overseas illegal distribution on its own, 69.1% of it webtoons, according to the same release.
The technical problem was demonstrated in the committee room. MP Jin Sun-mee showed members the process of copying a recent Naver Webtoon episode and posting it to another site, and said it took under a minute. The agency told the committee that platforms run tracking systems but that differences between apps and web browsers limit what those systems catch.
Individual titles show where the damage concentrates. The webtoon "Eleceed" was the most heavily pirated work across six languages, with 27,063 postings removed. "Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint" accounted for 19,280 removals across six languages, and SBS's "Running Man" led the broadcast category.
The agency monitors around 3,320 overseas local-language sites and platforms. It estimates there are 19,664 of them.
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