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Photo courtesy of Yonhap News |
[Alpha Biz= Kim Jisun] Seoul, January 4 – A South Korean court has ruled that unauthorized crawling (data extraction) of Naver’s real estate database (DB) constitutes copyright infringement. The judgment clarifies that even if a party did not create the original data, the organization and processing of data with significant labor and cost can be protected under copyright law.
The 24th Division of the Patent Court (Presiding Judge Woo Sung-yeop) issued a partial ruling in favor of Naver and Naver Financial in an appeal against Darwin Property last month. The court ordered Darwin Property to pay 80 million KRW (approx. USD 60,000) in damages—an increase from the 70 million KRW awarded by the lower court in September 2024—and to delete Naver’s real estate data stored on its servers, including 24 data fields such as apartment prices, floor plans, and unit details.
The dispute arose after Darwin Property crawled Naver’s real estate listings in February 2021 and posted them on its own platform, Darwin Brokerage. After Naver requested the company to stop unauthorized data use, Darwin Property attempted to convert the listings to an external link (outlink) format, where clicking an icon would redirect users to the original Naver page. The court, however, ruled that this also constituted unauthorized use of Naver’s data.
Legal experts note that the ruling reinforces the copyright protection of databases and signals potential increases in disputes between large platforms and startups over data crawling practices.
Alphabiz Reporter Kim Jisun(stockmk2020@alphabiz.co.kr)
