​Court Rules that Crawling Naver’s Real-Estate Database Is Illegal

​Court Rules that Crawling Naver’s Real-Estate Database Is Illegal

 

As legal disputes continue over the copyrightability of databases accumulated by platform companies, a Korean court has ruled that unauthorized crawling and use of Naver’s real-estate database is unlawful. The ruling confirms that even if a platform did not originally create the underlying data, copyright protection may still apply when the platform has invested significant labor and resources in organizing, verifying, and processing the data. With courts increasingly recognizing database copyright strictly, disputes over data crawling between large platforms and startups are expected to increase.

 

 

Patent Court: “Naver Made Substantial Human and Financial Investments”

 

According to the legal community on the 4th, the 24th panel of the Patent Court (Presiding Judge Woo Sung-yeop) ruled last month, on the 24th, in favor of Naver and Naver Financial in part in their damages lawsuit against Darwin Property. The court held that Darwin Property must not reproduce or transmit Naver’s real-estate database and ordered it to pay 80 million won in damages. This amount is 10 million won higher than the 70 million won awarded at first instance on September 1, 2024. The court also ordered Darwin Property to delete Naver real-estate data stored on its servers, including 24 categories of information such as apartment prices, floor area, building number, and floor level.

Darwin Property had crawled Naver’s real-estate listings in February 2021 and posted them on its own platform, Darwin Brokerage. After Naver demanded that Darwin stop collecting and using the data without authorization, Darwin switched to an “out-link” model, placing icons next to listings that, when clicked, opened the corresponding Naver real-estate page in a new window. Naver nevertheless filed suit, arguing that this still constituted unauthorized use of its data.

The court held that Naver qualified as the database producer and therefore owned the copyright. It explained that Naver had made substantial human and financial investments, including spending approximately 1 billion won to build and maintain a verification system that filters out false real-estate listings. The court further reasoned that even though Naver obtained listing data from real-estate agencies, it edited and arranged that data in a way tailored to Naver’s system, meaning Naver could not be regarded as a mere user of the information.

 

 

Different Outcomes Depending on the Nature of Crawled Data

 

Legal experts expect this appellate ruling to lead to more disputes over data crawling. Attorney Kwak Jae-woo of Lee & Ko, who represented Naver, said that courts have recently been more inclined to recognize database property rights. He added that although more Supreme Court precedents are needed, the fact that rights can be recognized whenever data is edited and processed with effort means that disputes are likely to increase.

There is also concern in the industry that startups offering services based on crawling the databases of large platforms like Naver will face significant litigation risks.

Courts have recently tended to assess the qualitative nature of crawled data more strictly when determining illegality. Outcomes differ depending on whether the data is merely publicly available information or has been processed and curated.

 

In Yanolja v. YeogiEottae, in which the founder of Yeogi Eottae crawled data from Yanolja’s servers, the Supreme Court acquitted the defendant in 2022. The Second Criminal Division of the Supreme Court held that the crawled data consisted mainly of publicly available information such as hotel names and addresses, and therefore did not constitute violations of the Information and Communications Network Act or the Copyright Act.

 

In JobKorea v. Saramin, Saramin copied JobKorea’s recruitment listings by crawling JobKorea’s database and reposted those listings on its own job-search platform. The Supreme Court held that JobKorea qualified as the producer of a protected database because it had made substantial investment in collecting, verifying, and organizing the recruitment information. As a result, Saramin’s large-scale extraction and reuse of that data was found to infringe JobKorea’s database copyright.

Similarly, in August last year, in the first-instance judgment in Minda v. MyRealTrip, the court found that the data held by Minda was publicly accessible, so MyRealTrip’s crawling could not be regarded as unlawful data theft. However, the court did rule that MyRealTrip had interfered with Minda’s business by repeatedly making and canceling reservations in order to carry out the crawling, and ordered it to pay 150 million won in damages.

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