K-dramas face rampant piracy in China — how can it be stopped?

Riding high on the global K-drama wave, piracy of Korean content continues to run rampant in China — a trend experts describe as particularly alarming given the country's sheer size and its role as a gateway to other Greater China markets — and tackling the problem, they say, will require stronger joint enforcement efforts and tools such as dynamic injunctions.

Currently, access to K-dramas in China remains limited, largely due to the lingering effects of an informal cultural ban.

Beijing began enforcing a series of unofficial retaliatory measures around 2017, following Seoul's confirmation of its deployment of the US THAAD missile defense system. Without a formal announcement, Chinese authorities have since moved to block Korean TV dramas, films, games and music from the market.

Yet the appetite for Korean content has proven impossible to suppress.

Douban, one of China's largest review aggregators, had logged 7,519 reviews for Netflix's "Boyfriend on Demand" as of Wednesday, despite the popular romantic comedy that released March 6 and stars Blackpink's Jisoo having no official distribution channel in the country. At present, Netflix does not operate in mainland China, where the service remains blocked under government censorship and data storage regulations restricting foreign streaming platforms.

The site also hosts 31,980 reviews for "The Art of Sarah," a Netflix Korean original thriller starring Shin Hae-sun that premiered Feb. 13, as well as a whopping 325,128 reviews for "When Life Gives You Tangerines," the runaway success of which last spring gave rise to a separate wave of rights violations in China, including the unauthorized use of cast images to promote counterfeit merchandise.

Illegal viewing of Korean drama series proliferates through a range of channels, including illegal streaming sites, unlicensed set-top box transmissions, peer-to-peer file-sharing networks and the circulation of links via encrypted messaging apps like Telegram.

And while piracy is a pervasive problem across the global entertainment industry, the scale of infringement in China is particularly concerning given the country's size and its role as a gateway to other Greater China markets, experts say.

Seo Kyung-deok, a professor at Sungshin Women’s University, noted that China stands out for the sheer scale of piracy cases and warned that the country redistributes secondary, locally reproduced versions of Korean content to other markets, including Taiwan.

And the longer-term implications could be even more damaging to the industry.

"It goes beyond the issue of creators not receiving fair compensation. If illegally distributed content continues to spread, it creates the perception among foreign audiences that Korean content can always be accessed for free," Seo said. "In the long run that would lead to significant losses."

Efforts to combat the problem have not been entirely absent, but they have yet to move the needle. Last year, the Korea Copyright Commission and China's National Copyright Administration convened to discuss bolstering bilateral cooperation on copyright enforcement. The two nations have maintained intergovernmental collaboration in the copyright space since signing a memorandum of understanding on copyright exchange and cooperation in 2006.

Yet government-led anti-piracy crackdowns have largely failed to produce meaningful results, and the financial toll continues to mount.

According to Kakao Entertainment's content protection division P.Cok, tracking down the operators of rogue sites remains the central obstacle to enforcement. P.Cok, established in 2021, is tasked with detecting, reporting and shutting down illegal distribution of the company’s various content such as series, webtoons and web novels.

"There are difficulties in the shutdown process when identifying operators, as servers are often distributed across multiple countries or operators conceal their identities. Recently, cases of evading tracking through the use of intellectual property bypassing and enhanced anonymity technologies have been increasing, further complicating enforcement," the team told The Korea Herald on Wednesday.

"In addition, differences in legal standards for copyright protection and weak enforcement in some countries can hinder effective international cooperation," it added. "To address this, it would be beneficial to strengthen joint investigations into copyright infringement crimes, while also introducing measures such as dynamic injunctions — implemented in some countries — and promoting awareness initiatives to make it more difficult to operate illegal sites."

A dynamic injunction is a court-ordered directive compelling internet service providers and other online intermediaries to block access to copyright-infringing sites that continuously shift their digital footprint.