Crawling program stole 500,000 pieces of data, the court found the plagiarism to be of significant profit-making circumstances.
According to reports from several Taiwanese media, the New Taipei District Court recently made a significant ruling on domestic legal database infringement cases. Lawsnote, known as the 'Google of the Legal World,' was found to have infringed on the copyright of its competitor Legal Source Information Company. The founders, Kuo Jung-Yen and Hsieh Fu-Ya, were sentenced to 4 years and 2 years in prison respectively, and together with Lawsnote, ordered to jointly compensate the Legal Source Company up to 154.5 million NTD. This case's ruling amount is extremely rare in similar cases domestically and internationally.
Legal Source Information Company was established in 1991 and has a history of 34 years, with its 'Legal Source Law Network' widely used by judicial authorities and businesses. Lawsnote was founded in 2016, aiming to create a 'Google of the Legal World' legal search system, attracting many financial institutions as clients.
The prosecution found that Lawsnote automatically searched and downloaded database content from the Legal Source Law Network through a crawling program for paid use by clients. After recalculating during the court hearing, the number of infringing data surged from more than 1,000 identified at the time of prosecution to over 500,000 pieces of regulatory developments and attachments.
The founder's violation of the law increases criminal liability, arguing that he was only editing and was not believed.
Lawsnote's founder, Kuo Jung-Yen, was originally a patent engineer in the IC design industry. At the age of 30, he switched careers to study law and obtained a lawyer qualification. Legal professionals point out that Kuo Jung-Yen, as a lawyer, violated the law and may face severe judgment from the court.
Lawsnote denied the crime in court, arguing that its data only involved the conversion of regulations into Chinese characters, digital transformation, and punctuation adjustments, and that the Legal Source Company could not claim copyright. However, after three years of hearings, the New Taipei District Court determined that Lawsnote's actions constituted plagiarism of others' copyrights and were used for profit, which was a serious circumstance.
The prosecution pointed out that Lawsnote had constituted 'intention to sell by unlawfully reproducing and infringing others' copyright' and 'illegally obtaining others' computer electromagnetic records' at the time of prosecution.
The court believes that the regulatory development data manually corrected by the Legal Source Company is original and constitutes a subject of copyright protection.
Lawsnote indicates its appeal position, emphasizing that the current product does not involve infringement.
In response to the verdict, Lawsnote issued a statement yesterday expressing deep regret and stated it would appeal in accordance with the law. The company admitted that during the initial development in 2019, it did indeed obtain some data from the Legal Source Company's website through automated programs but believes that Article 9 of the Copyright Act clearly states that laws and orders are not subject to copyright law, and there is still room for discussion regarding the court's determination that such development data is original.
Lawsnote emphasizes that the reproduction behavior involved in this ruling is limited to the period from 2018 to 2019 and has not been used for the current product. Currently, all legal data from its products comes entirely from government authorities and does not involve any infringement. The company stated that this case concerns the future development of legal technology in Taiwan and the public's right to access public regulatory information, and it will continue to fight to defend innovation and avoid monopoly of legal data by a single private enterprise.
This content is compiled by Crypto Agent from various information sources and reviewed by (Crypto City). It is still in the training stage and may contain logical deviations or information errors. The content is for reference only and should not be considered investment advice.
The article 'The Google of the Legal World is in Trouble! Lawsnote's Crawling Infringement, Why Did the Judge Heavily Sentence 4 Years and Fine 100 Million?' was first published on 'Crypto City'.