hankyoreh

A screen grab of www.spottoon.com

“Hand over my monkey.”

The words were blurted by a passing fan during a signing event by cartoonist Cho Seok last August at the International Cartoon Festival in Guangzhou, China. Another fan passed by the saucer-eyed organizers and repeated the same thing: “Hand over my monkey.”

It was enough to leave even Cho, author of the webtoon “The Sound of Your Heart,” nonplussed. The words never appeared in his cartoon. Instead, it came from a Mandarin translation site run by fans before that webtoon was officially provided in China. The seemingly random insertion jibed with the local sense of humor, and ended up becoming a popular coinage representing the webtoon. It’s a story with a lesson about the importance of local translation - and about the widespread illegal overseas distribution of webtoons without official local contracts.

South Korean webtoon services operating overseas are now locked in a tough battle with pirate sites. Originally places for fans to volunteer their own translations, they’ve taken to capturing and copying the translations and designs of service companies that have officially ventured into the local market. In the case of spottoon.com, illegal use of intellectual property was found for 43 of 46 works since operators Rolling Story first began providing English-language webtoon services last August. Reports listed them as including such popular webtoons as Yoon Tae-ho’s “Moss,” Kang Hyung-gu’s “Last,” and Kang Do-ha’s “Romance Killer.”

Rolling Story responded by sending infringement notices to around ten pirate sites. Actually stopping them is another matter, though. Pirate sites often change domains to elude crackdowns. Some use redirecting so that content from one is automatically transferred to different sites set up by visitors. After the content is lifted, title tweaks further complicate any attempts to stop them. For example, an official translation of Park Si-in’s “Shall We Have Dinner Tonight?” was renamed “How About Having Dinner Tonight?”

Early on, the pirate sites were “helpers” that Rolling Story looked at as business partners. They boasted passionate fans who volunteered their own translations out of love of the comics.

“The pirate sites today have a double standard when it comes to intellectual property rights,” said Rolling Story vice president Im Ji-yeong. “They argue for protecting the artists, yet they refuse to stop distributing the products.”

South Korean laws are also inadequate for cracking down on overseas products.

“About all you can do is order online service providers to suspend contacts with the parties transmitting reproductions,” said Moon Geon-yeong, an attorney with the law firm Hankyul. “It’s hard to apply that sort of measure to overseas sites.”

It is possible to punish South Koreans who post materials illegally to overseas sites. Last year, the webtoon company Lezhin Entertainment (www.lezhin.com) revealed that the person who had uploaded a cartoon to a Chinese portal site was a South Korean surnamed Choi. Choi even boasted of his use of a Chinese account to post the material. “Lezhin Comics can‘t do anything to me,” he wrote on his blog. “Catch me if you can.” Lezhin Entertainment launched services in Japan and the US in June and December of last year, respectively.

Leading South Korean webtoon services like Naver Comics and Daum Comic World are still third parties in the battle with overseas pirate sites. Naver offers webtoon services in five languages, including English and Indonesian all are free of charge. Daum Comic World has left the matter to its local corporation in China.

But since the piracy issue is a time bomb threatening to blast the Korean webtoon wave at any moment, many are calling on the South Korean government to take action.

“We’ve really sensed the interest growing since launching English-language services. Webtoons represent the vanguard of Korean Wave cultural products,” said Im Ji-yeong.

“The government has set the goal of fostering cutting-edge content like games and webtoons to claim new markets. It should be cooperating with other countries and working actively to crack down on illegal content,” Im added.

By Koo Dool-rae and Nam Eun-joo, staff reporters

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]