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Lee & Ko has been advising on production-related contracts and intellectual property clearance—covering copyright law, the Unfair Competition Prevention Act, and publicity rights—for Netflix series since 2022, contributing to the smooth production and distribution of major works. Representative projects include Squid Game Seasons 2 and 3, Culinary Class Wars, The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call, Karma, and Gyeongseong Creature Seasons 1 and 2.

Lee & Ko reviews a wide range of agreements essential to the production process, including talent and crew contracts, post-production agreements such as VFX, location leases, copyright use consents, and overseas PSAs for foreign shoots. Drawing on extensive experience, Lee & Ko provides practical, production-focused legal advice tailored to the needs of clients.

Lee & Ko’s clearance reviews primarily address issues in copyright, trademark, patent, and unfair competition law, as well as matters involving real names or depictions of real-life events. Depending on the content, Lee & Ko also advises on specialized issues, such as the use of Olympic symbols, youth protection in drama scenes and filming, and personal data consent. This breadth of expertise ensures that producers receive effective, comprehensive guidance across the many legal challenges of content creation.

Lee & Ko further supports clients on Errors & Omissions (E&O) insurance matters, including preparing title reports and conducting IP clearance, to help mitigate the risk of future copyright and personality rights claims. Representative work in this field includes MBC dramas Chief Detective 1958, Doubt, and Oh My Ghost Clients; SBS dramas Revenant, The First Responders, Payback: Money and Power and JTBC’s Reborn Rich.

Through these production-related legal services, Lee & Ko helps Netflix and leading production companies to actively identify and resolve legal issues in advance, safeguard against disputes, and ensure the seamless development and release of content. Lee & Ko continues to play a trusted role across numerous high-profile productions, earning consistent recognition and positive feedback from both Netflix and its production partners.

 

Lee & Ko has prevailed before the court of first instance, representing Naver in a database rights infringement dispute concerning unauthorized crawling of property listing information from ‘Naver Real Estate,’ Korea's leading real estate information service.

Naver and Naver Financial have built the ‘Naver Real Estate’ database through systematic maintenance, management and verification of property listing information, backed by significant human and material investments over an extended period. The two have been providing a high-quality online real estate service to customers by utilizing this database. The counterparty had been engaging in unauthorized crawling of ‘Naver Real Estate’ property listings by way of posting the same on its website ‘Darwin Property’ and proactively exploited it for the purpose of promoting its business. In response, Naver filed a lawsuit in May 2022, invoking database rights infringement under the Copyright Act and unfair competition, specifically misappropriation of achievements.

During the litigation, which lasted over three years, the counterparty claimed that it merely retrieved the property listing information temporarily from ‘Naver Real Estate’ through simple linking rather than copying or transmitting such information and contended that its use amounted to temporary reproduction and was therefore not illegal. Therefore, proving the counterparty’s database rights infringement became the key issue. Lee & Ko, based on its advanced technical understanding of databases, internet linking, crawling and network communication methods, focused on the technical evidence generated on the counterparty’s website during the period it, without authorization, crawled, accessed and copied ‘Naver Real Estate’ property information. Working closely with Naver’s engineers, Lee & Ko secured and submitted evidence of approximately 260,000 instances of unauthorized crawling-related copying and transmission to the court. Most importantly, Lee & Ko convinced the court by establishing through technical evidence that errors indicated in ‘Naver Real Estate’ were identically showed up on ‘Darwin Property,’ and that when certain information was deleted from ‘Naver Real Estate,’ such information was subsequently deleted from ‘Darwin Property’ as well after a certain period. This remarkable outcome illustrates the expertise and know-how accumulated by Lee & Ko’s Intellectual Property Group, which comprises numerous science and technology experts who have handled many similar cases.

In particular, Lee & Ko successfully fended off the typical “power abuse framing” strategy attempted by copycat latecomers in unauthorized crawling cases - namely, the claim that the market leader is “preventing market entry by latecomers.” Lee & Ko proved the infringement through objective evidence while convincingly explaining the illegality of the infringing acts from a legal perspective, ultimately succeeding in protecting the rights of Naver as the database creator.

In 2021, Versum Materials Korea (“Versum”) filed a patent invalidation action against Tri Chemical Laboratories (“Tri Chemical”) regarding a thin film formation material patent. Lee & Ko, representing Tri Chemical, the patentee, successfully defended the patent’s validity at the Intellectual Property Trial and Appeal Board (“IPTAB”) in July 2023. Although Versum subsequently filed an appeal with the IP High Court to revoke this decision, the IP High Court also upheld the patent’s validity on August 22, 2024 (prevailing on all claims), and this ruling was rendered final and conclusive on September 14, 2024.

The patent at issue directs to Cp hafnium compounds used as thin film formation materials, which are representative high-dielectric materials used to form insulating films at the ends of semiconductor DRAM capacitors or metal gates. This patent is considered so significant in the industry that it is valued at over KRW 1 trillion.

Versum argued that the patent lacked inventiveness as the patented compound was structurally similar to compounds disclosed in prior art references and could be easily derived. In response, Lee & Ko not only successfully articulated the legal principle that in the chemical field, even if compounds show structural similarities, the patent’s inventiveness cannot be readily denied if there are unpredictable and significant differences in effects. Lee & Ko also clearly demonstrated these differences by conducting and presenting comprehensive comparative experiments between the patented compound and prior art compounds.

As a result, both the IPTAB and the Patent Court determined that the patent could not be invalidated due to its unpredictable and significant effects compared to prior art compounds, successfully defending the patentee’s rights. The ruling serves as an important precedent regarding the finding of inventiveness in compound-related inventions.

This case attests to Lee & Ko’s Intellectual Property Group’s superb capabilities and expertise, as it successfully protected an enormously crucial patent from invalidation attempts through more than three years of persuasive arguments in hearings, grounded in  thorough technical review and legal analysis.
 

Lee & Ko Law secured a landslide victory (prevailing on all claims) on August 21, 2024 in a trade secret and copyright infringement lawsuit filed on June 29, 2020 on behalf of Ajinextek, a KOSDAQ-listed company that manufactures motion control chips and equipment for factory automation. The lawsuit was filed against former officers and employees who had misappropriated motion control technology-related source code files and were manufacturing and selling motion controllers using these files. The ruling was rendered final and conclusive on September 6, 2024.

In the related criminal case, (due to investigative authorities notifying the suspects before conducting the search and seizure), only seven source code files were seized from the former officers and employees, making it impossible to directly compare the source codes between the two companies. In response, Lee & Ko sought to prove trade secret and copyright infringement by analyzing the similarities between pseudocodes obtained through decompiling the core executable files of both companies’ motion control equipment software.

The Korea Copyright Commission conducted an appraisal, which showed that the quantitative similarity of pseudocodes for each executable file was relatively low at around 10%. However, Lee & Ko successfully argued and proved through detailed technical analysis that when pseudocodes were similar, their corresponding source codes were nearly identical, and that there were multiple qualitative similarities that could not exist in the first place, unless the source code had been misappropriated. As a result, the court recognized the trade secret and copyright infringement by the former officers and employees, ordering a complete ban on the use, disclosure, production and sale of source codes and executable files as well as their destruction and fully awarded the claimed damages of KRW 100 million (as part of the total claim).

This case stands as a rare example where trade secret and copyright infringement of software programs was fully recognized without direct source code comparison, achieved through more than four years of strong advocacy in hearings, based on thorough technical review and legal analysis. It exemplifies the outstanding capabilities and expertise of Lee & Ko’s Intellectual Property Group, gained from their extensive experience in handling numerous software-related trade secret and copyright infringement cases.

In a trade secret misappropriation lawsuit brought by Company A, a manufacturer of analytical devices for bone density and body composition, against its former employees and Company B founded by the former employees, Lee & Ko’s IP Practice Group successfully defended Company B and the former employees and obtained a court decision in favor of the defendants on all claims. 

Before this civil lawsuit, Company A had filed a criminal complaint against Company B and the former employees for trade secret misappropriation. During the criminal investigation, Company B’s product source code was found to contain portions that are similar to Company A’s product source code, which led to an indictment of Company B and the former employees. Company A then filed a preliminary injunction action against the defendants, seeking prohibition of trade secret misappropriation. As the defendant’s legal counsel, Lee & Ko conducted a thorough analysis of the two companies’ products, and showed that there were overall differences between the two products, from basic working principles to specific algorithms, and that the similar portions of the two products’ source codes were already disclosed in the public domain. Lee & Ko also showed that Company A failed to protect its source codes as a trade secret. As a result, Lee & Ko obtained an acquittal for Company B and the former employees in the criminal action and a court decision dismissing the preliminary injunction request in the civil lawsuit.

After this double loss, Company A additionally claimed copyright infringement of its computer software in the civil lawsuit. In response, Lee & Ko persuasively explained to the court that the source codes at issue were in fact taken from the public domain (such as dissertations) and that Company B did not use Company A’s technology in its product. The court agreed, and found in favor of the defendants on all claims, dismissing every claim raised by Company A in the complaint.

While this case started in unfavorable circumstances, with similarity found between the two companies’ source codes and the defendants having been criminally indicted, Lee & Ko’s IP Practice Group was able to reverse the tides and obtain a triple win, in the criminal case, the preliminary injunction case and finally the copyright infringement case, which nicely illustrates the prowess and expertise of Lee & Ko’s IP Practice Group.

Lee & Ko’s IP Practice Group successfully resolved the legal dispute on behalf of Broadcasting Company M, in a lawsuit brought by a competitor, Broadcasting Company J, that claimed copyright infringement and violation of the Unfair Competition Prevention Act ( “UCPA”). The issue in this case was whether the client copied the television show format of the competitor.

The two broadcasting companies had television audition programs for trot, a genre of Korean pop music, which enjoyed sensational popularity in Korea. Around January 2021, Company J filed a lawsuit against Company M seeking damages compensation as well as an injunction on the airing of Company M’s television show on the ground that Company M copied the format of Company J’s television show. Company J argued that such alleged copying constituted copyright infringement and unauthorized use of another’s achievements prohibited under the UCPA.

The central issue in the lawsuit became whether copyright infringement and unfair competition can be recognized with respect to a television show format. As Company M’s legal counsel, Lee & Ko carefully analyzed the legal principles on the format rights as recognized under the Copyright Act, and building on this analysis, persuasively showed that the elements underlying Company J’s claims  should not be seen as creative on their own and therefore were not eligible for copyright protection. Through its analysis of extensive materials regarding audition programs in South Korea and around the world,  Lee & Ko presented compelling evidence and ultimately established that the claimed elements had, in fact, been universally used in audition programs in the past, and that the two audition programs were not similar in terms of the overall construction and specific expressions, thus forcefully proving that Company M did not commit copyright infringement or an act of unfair competition. 

Subsequently, following fierce exchanges of legal arguments at oral hearings, Company J withdrew the case about 2 years after filing the lawsuit, which led to a successful resolution of the dispute. As this was a case specifically addressing intellectual property issues in the context of television show format rights, it is expected to carry a high precedential value. Lee & Ko’s meticulous analysis of the elements of the two television shows at issue, coupled with its extensive efforts to gather relevant evidence on both domestic and foreign copyright and unfair competition laws, resulted in this successful outcome.