Piracy Kingpin Behind ‘Noonoo TV’ and ‘TVWiki’ Arrested in Korea

Like most other countries, South Korea has a persistent piracy problem. Online streaming platforms in particular, have flourished in recent years.

Up until a year ago, ‘Noonoo TV’ was one of the leading players. Despite welcoming millions of monthly visitors, the site shut itself down citing bandwidth costs and other ‘pressure’.

Noonoo & TVWIKI

The self-imposed shutdown was unexpected but it didn’t take long before other streaming platforms filled the gap. One of these replacements was TVWIKI portal, which showed remarkable similarities with Noonoo.

For example, the Android apps of Noonoo and TVWIKI shared code and had the same application signing key. In addition, the two portals shared the same category structure and some videos streamed on TVWIKI had a Noonoo watermark.

TVWIKI’s rapid rise in popularity quickly made it a prime anti-piracy target, with Hollywood’s Motion Picture Association (MPA) labeling the operation a notorious piracy market.

In a report sent to the U.S. Government, MPA wrote that TVWIKI has millions of monthly visitors, who accounted for nearly 40 million visits in August. At the time, it used the tv51.wiki domain but it regularly switched to new homes to evade Korea’s stringent blocking measures.

“This series of domains utilizes ‘sequential domain aliasing’ to evade detection by enforcement vendors, traffic measurement bots, and evade site-blocking efforts,” MPA wrote at the time, adding that the operators are believed to be based in Korea.

Korea Shuts Down TVWIKI, Arrests ‘Noonoo’ Operator

TVWIKI’s reign ended abruptly this weekend, when its domain was forwarded to a shutdown notice hosted by GitHub. A message informed visitors that Korean authorities seized the domain. The site’s alleged operator, meanwhile, was arrested by a special unit of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.

The enforcement action appears to confirm the ties between Noonoo and TVWIKI. The takedown notice, hosted on the url ‘copyright241109.github.io/noonoowarrant‘, mentions that the alleged operator of TVWIKI is the same person who ran Noonoo and OKTOON, another pirate streaming portal.

“The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism’s Copyright Crime Scientific Investigation Unit arrested the operator of the illegal streaming website Noonoo TV on November 9, 2024, and seized the illegal streaming website TVWIKI and the illegal webtoon posting site OKTOON operated by the same operator,” the translated message reads.

South Korean news outlet MBN refers to the alleged operator as “Mr. A” but no further details have been released at this point.

The authorities link Noonoo and TVWIKI’s operator to OKTOON, a pirate site that specialized in Korean comics. OKTOON was targeted in a DMCA subpoena obtained by the Naver-owned company Webtoon in June this year, alongside 170 other domain names. Whether this action contributed to the eventual takedown of the site is unknown.

Rumors and Replacements

Given the evasive nature of the pirate streaming portal, some people suggested that the seizure was just a predetermined PR stunt to increase its popularity. This was partly triggered by the GitHub-hosted seizure banner.

However, with every passing hour, reality started to sink in. The Korean authorities likely use GitHub to offload traffic to an external service. The same tactic was used after the webtoon pirate site Agitoon was shut down in August of this year.

In a response to an inquiry from the local news outlet MK, an official from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism confirmed that the authorities are responsible.

“It is correct that the operator was arrested on the 9th, and the notice on the site was also posted by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism,” the spokesperson responded.

With the domain seizures and arrest, one of the largest Korean piracy operations has been rolled up. However, as is often the case, others will be eager to take over the brand, as also happened with Noonoo last year.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.