Kakao Entertainment and Naver Webtoon won a civil lawsuit they filed against the operator of the illegal site 'Ajitoon'.
Kakao Entertainment said on the 11th that it won the civil lawsuit it filed against the operator of the country's largest illegal webtoon·web novel distribution site 'Ajitoon'. The lawsuit was filed jointly with Naver Webtoon as co-plaintiffs, and the court fully granted the 1 billion won in damages claimed by each plaintiff, recognizing a total of 2 billion won in compensation.
'Ajitoon' is the country's largest illegal site that distributed about 750,000 webtoons and about 2.5 million web novels illegally, and the operator was arrested through a joint investigation by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Daejeon District Prosecutors' Office in August 2024. Subsequently, a two-year prison sentence was handed down in the criminal trial, and the same sentence was upheld on appeal.
'Ajitoon' operated for a long period by posting a vast number of webtoons and web novels without authorization, and is estimated to have caused enormous damage to creators and the content industry as a whole. Accordingly, Kakao Entertainment and Naver Webtoon filed civil lawsuits seeking 1 billion won each in damages, and during the litigation they calculated and submitted estimated damages in the trillions to billions of won based on the scale of distribution and the period of operation. The court accepted this and granted the full amounts claimed for each plaintiff, ordering payment of damages along with delayed interest and provisional execution.
This ruling is meaningful as a case that proceeded from the arrest and criminal punishment of the country's largest illegal distribution site, through the dismissal of the appeal, to a civil damages ruling, and as a result of public-private cooperation combined with sustained industry response. In particular, the entire response process, from investigation to criminal punishment to civil damages, was connected through judicial determination, and it is expected to serve as an important precedent for responding to similar illegal distribution cases in the future.
The ruling is also significant in that the industry, including Kakao Entertainment, actively raised public awareness of the illegal distribution problem and carried responses through each stage, connecting them to judicial determination. Kakao Entertainment actively responded to the case, including submitting a petition for severe punishment together with the webtoon illegal distribution response council (Kakao Entertainment, Naver Webtoon, Ridibooks, KidariStudio, Lezhin Entertainment, TopToon, Toomics), and later filed a civil lawsuit that led to this ruling. This has thereby accumulated meaningful precedents for protecting copyrights in the webtoon and web novel industry.
Kakao Entertainment legal director Lee Ho-jun said, "This ruling is meaningful as a case in which civil and criminal liability were both recognized for large-scale copyright infringement, confirming the scale and persistence of illegal distribution," and said, "We will continue to enhance the response system centered on the dedicated illegal distribution response organization and, when necessary, pursue legal action such as complaints and lawsuits to fulfill our responsibility to protect creators' rights."
Meanwhile, Kakao Entertainment has continuously advanced its response system that leads from deleting illegal content to tracking operators and shutting down sites through a dedicated illegal distribution response organization. In fact, it has taken the lead in protecting content by achieving the deletion of more than 1 billion accumulated pieces of global illegal content.
[Photo] Kakao Entertainment
[OSEN]