The Supreme Korean court says that scraping publicly available data is legal | Hacker News Reader

The Supreme Korean court says that scraping publicly available data is legal

lexology.com

292 pointsPigiVinci8353 comments

> The Supreme Court held that the Defendants did not access an unauthorized or restricted information network and found Defendants not guilty of violating the Information Protection Act based on the following findings: (i) there was no objective evidence showing that access to Yanolja’s API server was restricted or that Yanolja has implemented any technical measures blocking unauthorized access; (ii) Yanolja’s general terms of use was clearly applicable to registered users only; (iii) Yanolja’s general terms of use did not prohibit use of packet capture and scraping, which was used by Defendants; (iv) Yanolja’s API server was accessible via mobile app and a PC web browser; and (v) there was no reason to restrict access to Yanolja’s API server, as it was not used for storing valuable business information.

I am not a South Korean lawyer (or any lawyer), but basically this just means you do have to actually put effort into restricting access to information if you want to sue someone over illegally accessing it, right?

The US Supreme Court has actually called this a Gate Up/Gate Down approach and that if anyone can get in at any time the Gate is down. This is in respect to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

It seems the Korean Courts have affirmed this right as well.

I wonder if the Korean ruling cited SCOTUS as a reference point

I would kind of hope not - that would imply that they were considering US laws as in someway relevant to Korean law.

The US references legal happenings from abroad.

It's common for courts around the world to regard the decisions and reasoning of foreign courts as having good persuasive authority, even if they're not technically binding. Naturally, this is even more the case if the law is nearly identical across borders (as through trade agreements).

it should be mandatory for law makers. If other countries spend millions figuring stuf out you should at least have to explain what is wrong about it

So you're saying the rest of the world should be obliged to study SCOTUS reversing roe vs Wade when making their own abortion legislation?

Absolutely. Train wrecks should get studied to find out what went wrong.

I've looked at a tiny number of laws by country and it blew my mind how different the approaches were. A Japanese version seemed to expect various degrees. I have no idea about the culture but I can imagine a Japannees official carefully keeping his mouth shut if he has no relevant degree. Belgium and Iceland were deeply involved with public opinion. Dutch is about boiling the frog slowly.

It was facinating

Yes Indeed. That way they'd learn that courts don't make legislation, which you seem to be confused by. Now that Roe v Wade is gone, we can actually legislate on the issue and reduce the polarization in American politics by coming to democratic compromises, rather than be subject to rule by court fiat.

I don't know whether SCOTUS mentioned other countries, but it basically said that abortion was the legislature's call, just like it is in almost all of the rest of the world.

FWIW, the restriction upheld was significantly less restrictive than almost every European country.

You have been protesting France's law, right?

In the same way every single mechanical engineer should study Challenger '86, yes. Learn from fools and from sages.

But in reality it wouldn't amount to much, since very few countries have as strong a states/province rights as the US.

There will be hacks like that that allow dismissing choices made by other governments quickly but this isnt a bad thing it will make the differences more pronounced. We will love and hate "how things are done here" and learn how things could have been by looking at others.

Dont forget, opinions are dangerous to have in democracy. With each made public (i imagine) you lose something like 0,01% of support. One would best gently discard the other approaches taken.

That they are implemented often with measurable results also prevents making up some idiotic story what you think will happen.

Each country also has a history of law. Its like programming, everything needs to be rewritten and those who rewrite weren't there the last time. It works every time but at some point you should wonder if the right solution is already out there

Reversing Roe vs Wade means that individual states can decide on their own. Each states in USA has their elections. This means the decision is way more democractic than being decided by 9 people. SCOTUS didnt ban abortions. You go to Cali for example, you can still abort right to 8mths even if those babies or fetus can survive to adulthood without modern medicine (with modern medicine, fetus as youbg as 4mths can make it). If you feel unpleasant that you can have unprotective sex and kill fetus anyway you like it, you can move to the state that align with your preference. In the past Roe vs Wade basically oppress people who supported pro-life and they can't even move to any states as they are forced to accept and practice fetus killing nationwide. Of course you could argue, they leave country then. Well that also is a bit oppressive as now if you dont like the majority preference in USA you get out...sounds familiar?

Who was forced to practice fetus killing?

For civil law, my understanding is that judges are more likely to cite academic legal opinions published in journals rather than other prior cases. It would make sense in that context that it is fine to look at case law in other countries.

(I am a lawyer) courts routinely consider foreign judgments especially in the case of the highest court where they are at the bleeding edge of the law. They are not binding of course.

That's how a lot of law systems were constructed: many countries are basing their law on roman practices.

That's not inherently bad, IMO.

Gate up = open, gate down = closed. It’s echoing a medieval portcullis.

Hah! Good to know.

What are some examples of this?

E.g. if a website is free but requires an account to access (i.e. valid email address), is it still considered publicly accessible or not?

I do not know for sure either way, but my assumption is that it would be different if you must create a user account and in the process agree to terms of service that prohibit scraping.

According to the Korean Supreme court, if it requires an account to access, then the TOS applies. In this instance, an account was not required to access the data, therefore the TOS did not apply.

> (ii) Yanolja’s general terms of use was clearly applicable to registered users only;

Point 3 seems the most restrictive to the applicability of this ruling - it sounds like everyone's TOS is likely going to be updated with a clause prohibiting packet capture and scraping.

This is very old hat. A friend battled the old British Telecom, after Deutsche Telekom (the rest crumbled after that) to publish Telex businesses directories a whole couple of generations ago.

Copyright laws protect the structure and occasionally(via trade dress usually) formatting of your data. But common sense informs this entire oeuvre of issues that if the utility of the information that you are working with is inherently extant ion openness then the judiciary will politely post you a clue and the check. Utility forms a considerable amount of legal doctrine in so called intellectual property(which is a fallacious misnomer introduced into the lexicon purely for purely self serving reasons only very recently). Infringing a unused order poorly exploited patent and the registration owner sues? No fear because you're going to have to pay fair royalties and be allowed to carry on unless you been some kinda jerk. This is all about the appropriation of the basic infrastructure for human life. Yet the amount of misunderstood and very elementary (Googleable) law passing debate without comprehension is much more frightening than this moot threat, it indicates nearly complete cooption of principal values of human development.

I think the bar to whether something is an "illegal data breach" or not, should be whether the security is half-decent according to most security researchers. Because in cases like these (and the one where someone almost got arrested for clicking "view source"), the vast majority of security researchers will agree that the security was terrible and irresponsible.

Even scraping public data could be a gray area e.g. if you're scraping a huge amount of possible addresses or de-aggregating on a massive scale. More importantly, you could say that you are doing this, e.g. claim that you found a "secret" 64-bit key by evaluating every possible one. But if your data is accessible via simple API requests, clearly there is limited "guessing" or brute-force going on.

On the one hand, I do think that scraping should be legal, on the other hand, I maintain a lot of websites and scrapers are a gigantic pain in the ass that make hosting a popular site for normal people cost-prohibitive (you need to scale up servers or invest engineering time to prevent scraping).

This can only lead to a more centralised web where only rich people can afford to host content.

There needs to be a solution like some kind of internet metadata archive, distributed on IPFS or something where bots can get their data if they want.

With what kind of sites do you see this as as a problem and what level of traffic do you get from these scrapers? There was a discussion [0] 11 days ago about this concerning a search engine, but for many other websites you can just pre-generate almost all of the content and use microcaching to cover anything that has to be dynamic to drive the per-request cost to almost 0.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32339314

Tech people applaud this, but then they are all upset when someone collects 100 mil Facebook/... public profiles.

http://haveibeenscraped.com/

That's quite the broad brush you're painting with.

We should all understand that if you post something that's public, it's... public.

I think it's reasonable to believe that public information should be accessible, and also be upset that things you expect to be private were made public.

I feel my stance is the same. If I can take out a pen and paper and write down the information I see on my screen, I see no reason not to have a computer perform a similar function.

Granted, I hope a decade and generation born into social media has learned all these lessons about being careful about what you post, at least compared to when this was novel teaching material in my high school. But then again, they may also think Snapchat is ephemeral enough, so jury's out

In other words, you can build a Korean 'Google' today by scraping Google.

Good luck. Legal precedent has exactly zero impact on Google’s fair use policies. You’ll get throttled, and then banned before you get your first customer.

Well, the ruling says you can’t have it legally enforced if you don’t put any effort into it, but Google definitely puts effort into blocking scrapers.

Also, Koreans mostly use Naver as their search engine.

Do scrapers all proxy out of Seoul now?

Scraping is legal in the US as of a few years ago.

https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/technology/...

That ruling is not surprising. Just affirming comon sense.

Without it e. g. Web search would not be possible.

Supreme Korean Court has a rather different vibe from Korean Supreme Court

there is going to be a lot of scrapers running out of South Korea :)

Other news on web scraping world at https://thewebscraping.club/p/a-brief-wrap-up-of-the-latest-...

my approach:

if it's on google, it can be on my website

that is too restrictive. robots.txt isn't the law.

It's not, but why ignore the express wishes of website owners?

out of disrespect for IP

The EULA of this HN comment requires you to deposit $2 in my bank account upon reading. Why are you ignoring my wishes?

What is your bank account?

Because that is a false equivalency. And also, you never responded with your bank info.

Which why they rightly did not say "if and only if".

I mean sure, but the law of dont be a dick and the world isnt a dick to you applies.

Err, there is still copyright. Google only posts snippets as fair use.

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