Supreme Court: "Unauthorized Database Duplication and Sale Constitutes Copyright Infringement"

Court: "Systematically Created Database, Copied As Is"

The Supreme Court has ruled that replicating another person's database without permission and selling it for a certain fee constitutes an infringement of the creator's rights and violates copyright law.

Supreme Court, Seocho-gu, Seoul.

The Supreme Court's First Division (Presiding Justice Oh Kyung-mi) announced on the 20th that it upheld the original court ruling sentencing Mr. A to two years in prison on charges of violating copyright law.

Mr. A was charged with copyright infringement after replicating a database used in a program for managing detailed estimates that integrates functions by construction fields such as architecture, civil engineering, and machinery, used for cost calculation in construction projects in 2018, and distributing it to an unspecified number of people for a certain fee.

The trial focused on whether Mr. A's actions constituted a violation of copyright law by infringing on the rights of the database creator.

Both the first and second trials found that Mr. A infringed on the rights of the database creator and sentenced him to two years in prison.

The Supreme Court held that Mr. A replicated a substantial portion of the victim's database both quantitatively and qualitatively, thereby infringing on the rights of the victim as the database creator.

The court stated, "The victim's database was not simply a collection and listing of public data corresponding to individual materials under copyright law, but was created by systematically arranging them through related interpretation," and added, "The defendant replicated and used the victim's database as is in the database of his own program to shorten the database work period."

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