Obtaining a winning judgment for Naver in a case involving unauthorized crawling of “Naver Property” property listing information.

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.