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
In force since .
A database right rule binding public and private bodies.
- Audit expectation
- none
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.
These lines are LexLint's reading of the law's text. Also read by: Supreme Court of Korea, judgment of , case no. 2021Do1533 (recorded ).
In the frameworks
- NIST AI RMF
- MAP 4.1Approaches for mapping AI technology and legal risks of its components – including the use of third-party data or software – are in place, followed, and documented, as are risks of infringement of a third party’s intellectual property or other rights.
Our reading of where this law's duties sit in each framework. It never says that running a control meets the law. How we read a framework against the law
Who enforces it
Settledness
- As of
- Case link
- https://www.law.go.kr/precInfoP.do?precSeq=221765
- Case citation
- Supreme Court of Korea, judgment of , case no. 2021Do1533
- Open questions
- Which repeated or systematic reproductions of individual materials "conflict with the normal exploitation" of a database or "infringe unduly on the interests of database producers" under Article 93(2) of the Copyright Act, given that the Supreme Court tested whether the producer invested substantially in producing, updating, verifying or supplementing the part copied?
What it makes you log
Logging duty
Articles 91 to 98 protect the database producer: Article 91 names the databases protected (those of Korean nationals and of foreign nationals protected by treaty), Article 93 gives the right to reproduce, distribute, broadcast or interactively transmit the whole or a considerable part, Articles 94 to 97 set limits, the five-year term, transfer and statutory licence, and Article 98 applies the registration provisions. None requires the person addressed to create, keep, produce or review a log or record, and Article 91 turns on who owns the database, not on where the copying happens, so no territorial hook is coded.
- Kind
- None
- As of
What this law does
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. 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 reporting of the statute's structure rather than its own published text.
The database-producer right did not exist in the Copyright Act's original 1957 text; it was added by Act No. 6881, promulgated , which entered into force , 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, pending primary confirmation from law.go.kr.
When LexLint raises it
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