(ANN/KOREA HERALD) – A US court has ordered the shutdown of Kokoa TV, a streaming website involved in the illegal distribution of Korean content to overseas audiences.
The ruling favored Wavve Americas, a joint partnership between SK Telecom and three major Korean broadcast networks, which filed a lawsuit against Tumi MAX, the operator of Kokoa TV, citing copyright and trademark infringement.
The US District Court, District of Arizona, directed Tumi MAX to cease activities such as storing, reproducing, displaying, or distributing copyrighted works as of February 9.
Additionally, the court ordered Kokoa TV to stop using the mark “Kocowa” or any confusingly similar mark in commerce, including variations of “Kokoa.”
Wavve Americas accused Kokoa TV of illegally distributing Korean content, some of which were exclusive to platforms like Wavve, Netflix, and Disney+.
The lawsuit also alleged that Kokoa TV deliberately adopted a similar name to Kocowa to divert audiences to its domain.
According to Similarweb, a service estimating website traffic, 77 per cent of Kokoa TV’s users were from the US and Canada.
A survey by the Korea Copyright Protection Agency in January 2023 revealed that an estimated 350 million Korean video contents and webtoons were posted on illegal streaming sites in various languages in 2023.
Korean content accounted for 15.4 per cent of the total estimated 2.26 billion postings on illegal streaming sites, based on data collected from 1,035 out of 12,979 sample websites identified by the Korea Copyright Protection Agency between August 25, 2023, and October 18, 2023.
