Law note · South Korea
Unfair Competition Prevention and Trade Secret Protection Act, Art. 2(1) items ka and pa (data misappropriation and general catch-all)
What it asks of an app
- Do not acquire data by theft, fraud, unauthorized access, or other wrongful means, or use or disclose data acquired that way.
- Do not use, disclose, or provide to a third party, beyond a contractual access limit and for wrongful profit or to harm the data holder, data you accessed under that limit.
- Do not create, provide, or distribute a technology or device whose main purpose is to circumvent a technical measure protecting data.
- Separately, do not use the outcome of another person's substantial investment or effort for your own business, in a manner contrary to fair commercial practice, without authorization.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_webtrains_models
What we found
Item pa is the general catch-all: using, contrary to fair commercial practice, the outcome of another person's substantial investment or effort for one's own business without authorization. It has done most of the real work in reported scraping cases: the Seoul High Court found systematic evasive scraping of a competing job-listing database an unfair-competition violation in Saramin Co. v. JobKorea Co. (2016Na2019365, 6 Apr.
2017, secondary-sourced), and in Yanolja Co. v. GC Company's parallel civil proceeding (Seoul High Court, 2021Na2034740, 25 Aug. 2022, secondary-sourced) the same scraping conduct that cleared criminally under the Information and Communications Network Act nonetheless lost under this clause, with an award of roughly KRW 1 billion.
A separate item, ka, added no earlier than December 2021 and not previously catalogued in this topic's research, is a purpose-built data-misappropriation clause: it reaches acquiring data by theft, fraud, unauthorized access, or other wrongful means and using or disclosing data so acquired; using or disclosing data obtained under a contractual access limit beyond that limit, for wrongful profit or to harm the data holder; acquiring or using data known to have been obtained either way; and providing, manufacturing, or distributing a technology or device whose main purpose is to circumvent a technical measure protecting data.
Item ka's structure closely parallels China's 2025 Anti-Unfair Competition Law Article 13 and is more directly on point for a scraping fact pattern than item pa's general catch-all.