Securing a final judgment in database rights infringement suit over crawling of Naver Real Estate listings

Lee & Ko’s IP & Technology Practice Group represented Naver and Naver Financial (the “Plaintiffs”), operators of Naver Pay Real Estate (formerly Naver Real Estate), Korea’s largest real estate information service, in an action seeking an injunction against Darwin Property (the “Defendant”), operator of the real estate listing service Darwin Brokerage, for infringement of database producers’ rights. Lee & Ko secured a favorable judgment at first instance and again on appeal, obtaining a final and conclusive judgment.

In this case, the court rendered a judgment that expressly confirmed that, even for real estate listing information posted on publicly accessible websites, infringement of a database producer’s rights may be established where a competitor collects and uses, without authorization and on a large scale, a platform database that was compiled, verified, classified, and updated through the investment of substantial cost and effort. In particular, the appellate court not only enjoined the Defendant from reproducing, distributing, transmitting, and assigning the data, but also ordered the deletion of the reproduced data, and recognized an increased amount of damages compared to the first instance, thereby making clear the importance and necessity of protecting platform data.

The Defendant argued that it had used only a portion of the Plaintiffs’ database, and that even if there had been reproduction, it amounted to no more than temporary reproduction and therefore did not constitute infringement. In response, Lee & Ko pointed out that the Defendant had, over a long period, repeatedly and systematically reproduced and transmitted a substantial part of the Plaintiffs’ database and had used it in operating its own service to obtain economic benefit, and, by analyzing technical materials such as source code, API request records, and crawling logs, specifically proved the circumstances of the Defendant’s crawling and data use on that basis.

In particular, at the technical hearings held in both the first instance and the appellate proceedings, Lee & Ko used images and videos in its oral arguments to visually explain the crawling structure, the API request method, and the flow of data collection, storage, and posting, arguing the case in a manner that enabled the court to intuitively understand the process by which the Plaintiffs’ data was reflected on the Defendant’s site. This evidentiary strategy, combining legal theory with technology, played a decisive role in leading the court to find that the Defendant’s conduct constituted infringement of database rights rather than mere temporary access.

This judgment is a significant crawling-case ruling that follows in the line of the JobKorea–Saramin (online recruitment and job-search platforms) and Yanolja–Yeogi Eottae (accommodation and travel-booking platforms) cases. It is regarded as a landmark decision that clearly delineates the legal limits on the unauthorized collection and commercial use of publicly available data in platform-data and AI/data-utilization businesses.