After the resurrection of a particularly popular piracy site in South Korea, the competent authorities of the country and the rights holders announced the deployment of automated systems via AI to detect and block pirate sites.
While Soap2Day, a big name in illegal streaming, has just closed its doors, South Korea is preparing to deal the deathblow to a particularly popular pirate site in its borders.
With tens of millions of monthly visitors, the illegal streaming platform Noonoo TV has made powerful enemies over the years. This conflict with the rights holders and the South Korean authorities ended in March 2023.
Noonoo TV closes in the face of pressure from South Korea
At that time, South Korean broadcasters, the Korea Film and Video Copyright Association (film producers and distributors), and several legal streaming platforms, announced the formation of an anti-piracy coalition to fight against Noonoo TV and others.
Faced with the pressure exerted by this entity and “at the outrageous cost of bandwidth”, the pirate site decided to close its doors in April 2023. However, several new domain names such as noonoo.app, noonootv.live or noonootorrrent.com quickly took over. Among them, a domain name showed great popularity: noonoo.lol.
Also read: Piracy – 60% of users also buy content legally
The site is back, an AI to block it
The site, presented under the name Noonoo TV Season 2, stood out as a true copy of the original: same interface, same content, same advertisements for gambling companies. Without surprise, this resurrection is not to the liking of the South Korean authorities.
As our colleagues from the Torrent Freak site report, the Ministry of Information Science and Technology has already announced its intention to introduce enhanced blocking measures to disrupt the service. “When responding to the original site, we were able to block access once per day, but this time we will streamline the response system so that we can block multiple times per day.” describes the ministry.
To do this, the ministry, in association with the Korea Communications Commission and the National Security Agency, wishes deploy automated detection and blocking systems : “Since the detection and response to illegal sites is currently centered on human resource-based manual work, we plan to develop technology that can automatically detect and check for new versions and substitute sites, in order to overcome this limitation”’ . It remains to know the technical details of these new devices.