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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.

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.