Usually I'm very against such diligent copyright enforcement, but in this case the infringement seems egregious and committed on a for-profit basis. Am I missing something?
The rising popularity of anime/manga in the west is significantly linked to the consumption of pirated media content released by scanlation/fansub groups. Even Crunchyroll —a site that is relatively new and brought about more legal viewing options than ever— started as a piracy site.
While nowadays there are more commercial options than a few niche players who only bring over a small sampling of series, it still is a fact that overwhelmingly most anime/manga prior to 2010 is and was never commercially available in multiple regions. In the regions it was available many products were also only partially available or heavily bowdlerized.
I feel the entire anime/manga industry is sitting on a gold mine and is too focused on blaming piracy, where the real issue is the lack of true availability for many titles. Instead of focusing on piracy they would be more successful in; doing something about Sony having a near monopoly on distribution of the entire industry's content in the west, crack down on bad localization bowdlerizing their series, and work on translating and distributing their older content.
Korean Webtoon/Manwha companies have the same identical issues faced by the Japanese Anime/Manga industries, but they are much more heavy handed with enforcement. Often to the point of unreasonableness, like going after technology neutral applications that serve legal purposes.
Microsoft famously said they rather have people pirating their software than someone else's. Another example is how pirating Photoshop doesn't hurt Photoshop, but does hurt e.g. Paint Shop Pro.
Guess hosting etc. was in US for DMCA to be applicable to these sites
Several times I’ve licensed content via the Naver app, in order to support the manhwaga, but then read it via a scanlation service because the user experience and translation is so much better. The pirates often have better recommendations, too.
When customers have no channel available for purchase whatsoever, or the channel is painfully sub-standard, or creates insurmountable barriers, it’s hardly surprising that enterprising buccaneers fill the gap.
A classic case of “piracy is a service problem”, and throwing the DMCA around isn’t going to make them any more money.
Recently another Korean publisher Kakao killed the open source manga reader Tachiyomi.
I wish Hell Joseon would just keep to itself. I wouldn't even miss Samsung at this point to be honest.