Overseas piracy of K-content nears 500 mln cases in 2025: lawmaker

SEOUL, Oct. 12 (Yonhap) -- The number of Korean content that was illegally distributed overseas reached nearly 500 million cases last year, the highest number since 2022, a lawmaker said Monday.

The number of reported cases hit 493.6 million in 2025, up 19.2 percent from the previous year, according to the data submitted to Rep. Jeong Jun-ho of the ruling Democratic Party by the Korea Copyright Protection Agency.

The figure is the highest since 477.1 million in 2022, when the agency began compiling relevant data.

Of the total, piracy cases involving webtoons accounted for the majority at 66.5 percent, followed by films and broadcasts at 33.5 percent.

By language, 46.6 percent of the reported cases involved content distributed in English, followed by Chinese at 20.4 percent and languages of Southeast Asian nations at 15.7 percent.

While the number of content illegally distributed in English fell 17 percentage points on-year, the portion of those distributed in languages of Southeast Asian and European nations, such as Vietnamese, Thai, Spanish and French, rose.

Despite a surge in digital piracy cases, the number of illegally distributed content that was deleted came in at 243,374 cases, less than 0.1 percent of all reported cases.

Jeong, the lawmaker, called for an increase in the number of teams monitoring digital piracy and heightened cooperation with overseas authorities.