Copyright Act, Arts. 91-98 (database producer's right)

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 was located and cited, but this session's fetch returned only a script shell rather than the article text, so the content above follows the research brief's account rather than an independent re-extraction.

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 a re-fetch of law.go.kr.