South KoreaCopyright Act, Arts. 91-98 (database producer's right)
Copyright Act of the Republic of Korea (Act No. 432, as amended), Arts. 91-98
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What follows is LexLint's own research summary of this law, not legal advice.
In force since 1 July 2003.
A database right rule binding public and private bodies.
As of 29 August 2026.
What it requires
- Do not reproduce, distribute, broadcast, or transmit all or a substantial part of a database another party made a substantial investment to build, verify, or present.
- Treat systematic or repeated collection of individually non-substantial parts of such a database as reaching a substantial part where it conflicts with the database's ordinary use or unfairly harms the producer.
What this law does
Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.
The Copyright Act gives a sui generis database-producer right, running five years from a database's completion or substantial renewal, to a person who has made a substantial investment (human or material) in producing, verifying, or presenting a database, independent of whether the database's own contents are copyrightable.
Systematic, repeated, or purposeful reproduction of individual materials or non-substantial parts can itself count as reproducing a substantial part where it conflicts with the database's ordinary use or unfairly harms the producer's interests. The Seoul High Court applied this right in Saramin Co. v. JobKorea Co. (2016Na2019365, 6 Apr.
2017, secondary-sourced), holding that systematic scraping of a competing job-listing database via VPN IP-masking, user-agent spoofing, and ignoring robots.txt infringed the database-producer right and separately was unfair competition. This official law.go.kr page is located and cited, but serves only a script shell rather than the article text, so the account above rests on secondary sourcing rather than on an independent read of the article.
The database-producer right did not exist in the Copyright Act's original 1957 text; it was added by Act No. 6881, promulgated 27 May 2003, which entered into force 1 July 2003, the date recorded here as this chapter's commencement. Because law.go.kr itself returned only a script shell, the amendment date is confirmed instead against a Korean case-law database's structured amendment history for the Act, secondary-sourced pending primary confirmation from law.go.kr.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_web
Read the law
official text, National Law Information Center (law.go.kr)
article text not independently re-extracted
Every line above is drawn from the primary source linked here, read on the date shown. This is a research summary, not legal advice.