[DigitalToday reporter Ho-jung Lee] Kakao Entertainment has published its ninth white paper on responding to illegal distribution on Aug. 27, featuring Darkchaser, its in-house copyright protection system, and related results.

Darkchaser integrates the copyright infringement response process into a single system, from detecting illegal content to reporting, confirming processing results, tracking domains and managing response histories. Kakao Entertainment developed it based on years of accumulated anti-piracy data and technology.

It is currently conducting 24-hour monitoring worldwide for about 16,000 Kakao Entertainment webtoon and web novel intellectual property rights. It integrates management on a dashboard, including multilingual keyword detection, tracking of domain changes and analysis results of repeat infringement patterns.

It was designed to analyze infringement patterns and links among illegal sites to identify repeat infringement and signs of new leaks early. It is a system implementation of the TTT (Targeting·Tracing·Takedown) strategy introduced in last year's seventh anti-piracy white paper.

TTT is an approach that moves from identifying illegal sites (Targeting) to tracking operators (Tracing) to site shutdowns and legal responses (Takedown). Kakao Entertainment also enhanced its in-house watermarking technology to identify initial leakers and block repeat leaks.

Darkchaser began as a beta version at the end of 2025 and later added functions in stages. It plans to analyze data accumulated during operations to strengthen leak prevention functions and a system for providing copyright protection information for creators and content providers (CP).

The scale of illegal content deletion has also increased. Kakao Entertainment blocked about 126,160,000 cases of illegal global webtoon and web novel content over six months in the first half of this year. That was up 24.8 percent from 101,120,000 cases in the second half of last year.

Since launching its dedicated anti-piracy organization P.CoK (Protecting the Content of Kakao Entertainment) in November 2021, Kakao Entertainment has deleted more than 1.1 billion cases of illegal global webtoon and web novel content cumulatively through June this year.

A Kakao Entertainment official said the company is unveiling its in-house Darkchaser for the first time through the white paper and presenting the direction of a copyright protection system that can enable prevention in advance. The official stressed it will continue to advance its technology and expand cooperation with relevant institutions and global groups.