A screenshot of unauthorized use of Naver blog post

Naver, Korea's portal giant controlling over 80 percent of the local online search market, is overflowing with illegal contents. However, Naver is virtually leaving the illegal content distribution as it is, claiming, "Thousands of new posts are uploaded every second, so it's hard to filter illegal content one by one."

You can easily find cases of stealing blog posts if you search on Naver with keywords like "blog theft", "blog post theft", and "illegal use of blog image".

A power blogger 't***6', who has been operating a restaurant review blog for several years, said, "Blog content theft or illegal reproduction became so common. They don't officially scrap the post but copy it without owner's permission and upload it on their blog or café as if the post was created by themselves, damaging the original authors."

He said, "The most ridiculous thing that happened was when I searched on Naver for my previous post, I couldn't find my post in the result, and all I could find was other blogger's which was illegally reproduced from my post. When I looked up the blog, I found hundreds of other bloggers' illegally reproduced posts apart from my post sorted by 30 different categories."

He continued, "I reported this blog to Naver's reporting center but all I could hear from Naver was that it warned the blogger and I couldn't hear about the progress anymore. It's so absurd that Naver doesn't monitor or crack down on hundreds of illegal replicated posts."

A PR team at Naver said, "Currently, a monitoring workforce of 500 people is monitoring illegal posts for 24 hours in day and night shifts. However, we can't filter all the posts by checking one by one as more than hundreds of posts are uploaded every second."

When asked about exposure of illegal replicated posts instead of original content, the PR team claimed, "We cannot reveal the standard of blog search exposure ranking. Through project BiO (Better is Original), we try to expose the original content prior to the scrapped one."

A post written by a victim of Naver post theft

Kim In-Sung, professor of Computer Engineering at Hanyang University, said, "Naver exposing illegal content before the original one goes beyond its search system and it threatens the survival of authors. Naver must figure out a plan to protect the trustworthy original content and provide it to users foremost."