Supreme Court Confirms Not Guilty Verdict for Former CEO of Yeogi Eottae in Unauthorized Collection of Yanolja's Business Information Case

[Asia Economy Reporter Choi Seok-jin, Legal Affairs Specialist] The acquittal of 'Yeo-gi-eo-ddae' officials who unlawfully accessed the server of 'Yanolja,' the leading player in the accommodation sharing app industry, and stole business information such as partner accommodations has been finalized.

On the 12th, the Supreme Court's 2nd Division (Presiding Justice Lee Dong-won) dismissed the prosecutor's appeal in the final trial against former With Innovation CEO and Yeo-gi-eo-ddae founder Shim Myung-seop, then head of the company's business strategy team B, and program developer C, who were indicted for violating the Information and Communications Network Act (information network intrusion), computer business obstruction, and copyright law, thereby upholding the lower court's verdict of acquittal for all defendants.

The court stated, "There is no error in the lower court's judgment of acquittal that violates logic and the rules of experience, exceeds the limits of free evaluation of evidence, or misinterprets the law."

Shim and others were indicted on charges of intruding approximately 16 million times into Yanolja's mobile app API server from June to October 2016 (information network intrusion) to steal business-related information for commercial use, and unlawfully copying information such as partner accommodation names, addresses, room names, usage prices, discounted prices, and check-in/check-out times 264 times from January to June of the same year (infringement of the rights of database producers under copyright law).

Since 2015, Yeo-gi-eo-ddae had been manually collecting and using this information for business purposes by accessing Yanolja's mobile app or PC website. However, starting January 2016, under the direction of Team Leader B, they began using an automated data collection program (crawling) developed by C, which allowed them to easily steal large amounts of information.

Additionally, after accessing Yanolja's server, they input unauthorized commands into a program originally designed to search only accommodations within a 7 to 30 km radius from the user's location, causing it to retrieve information on accommodations within a 1000 km radius from their own company. This altered the program's original function, causing information processing disruptions or user connection interruptions, thereby interfering with accommodation reservation operations (computer business obstruction).

The first trial found most of these charges guilty, sentencing former CEO Shim to 1 year and 2 months in prison with a 2-year probation, Team Leader B and developer C to 10 months in prison each with a 2-year probation, and ordering 160 hours of community service for Shim and 120 hours each for B and C. The company corporation, prosecuted under joint liability provisions, was fined 10 million KRW.

However, the court acquitted them of the charge that their actions caused Yanolja's server access to be interrupted, making it unusable for users, reasoning that the days when the server access was interrupted were weekends or holidays when access was originally high, and that it could not be considered intentional disruption without knowledge of the server's limits.

The second trial's judgment differed. The appellate court ruled that Yanolja did not intentionally hide or block access to the API server's internet address (URL), and that the information stolen by Yeo-gi-eo-ddae was already publicly available to users. Therefore, even though crawling was used, the information could have been obtained through the Yanolja app, and thus it did not constitute information network intrusion.

Furthermore, for copyright infringement of database producers to be established, the 'whole or a substantial part' of the database must be copied. The information collected by Yeo-gi-eo-ddae covered only 8 out of about 50 items, such as company name and room name, most of which were publicly available and could be confirmed through the app, making it difficult to consider it a copyright violation.

Lastly, since Yanolja's server's purpose is to return accommodation information corresponding to given command statements, even though the search range was expanded to within a 1000 km radius, it was considered use according to the original purpose, and thus computer business obstruction charges were not established.

The Supreme Court also agreed that the appellate court's judgment was correct.

Meanwhile, in the civil lawsuit filed by Yanolja against Yeo-gi-eo-ddae, the first trial in August last year recognized Yeo-gi-eo-ddae's liability for damages amounting to 1 billion KRW, and the appeal trial is currently underway. At that time, the court ruled that Yeo-gi-eo-ddae's actions constituted unfair competition under the Unfair Competition Prevention Act, ordered compensation for damages, and prohibited copying, distributing, or storing any information about Yanolja's partner accommodations.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.