Taiwan’s household registration and land administration systems have inherited the foundation established during the Japanese colonial period and have long been recognized for their precision and completeness. Today, these systems are highly computerized and managed by the relevant government agencies. Needless to say, the data they contain hold significant commercial value.
However, some practical information is not yet covered by these government databases. For instance, the Ministry of the Interior manages the Real Estate Transaction Price Registration Database, which allows the public to access data such as building age, number of floors, community names, and transaction prices for properties at specific addresses. Yet this database does not provide photos of the community’s exterior. Such information, of course, can be obtained from other sources, such as the databases of well-known real estate agencies or Google Maps.
In 2015, a real estate intelligence service provider came up with an idea to integrate government and private databases into a real estate search system. The company launched their own database that allows the public to access and search for free, and they even patented this idea in 2017.
In 2022, the company discovered that a user with a particular IP address had downloaded 102,228 entries of data from their database over seven days. Believing this act constituted copyright infringement, the company filed a criminal complaint. The prosecutors’ investigation revealed that the data had been downloaded using a web crawler by an IT company contracted to update the national postal system, which did not support searches for community names. The user claimed that they had downloaded the complainant’s data to study ways to improve the national postal system’s mail sorting and delivery functions.
The key issues in this criminal case thus revolve around the question of whether the Complainant’s database constitutes a compilation work protected under the Copyright Act. The prosecutors’ answer was in the affirmative; they accordingly indicted the user along with its CEO.
However, the court took the opposite view. Taipei District Prosecutors’ Offices v. Bei-Yi Information Co., Ltd., 113 Zhi-Shang-Yi 35, Taiwan’s IP & Commercial Court (January 2025). Both the first-instance and second-instance courts held that the complainant’s database did not constitute a copyrightable work.
Under Taiwan’s Copyright Act, a copyrightable work must meet the following requirements:
- Originality: The work must be independently created by the author rather than copied or reproduced from another source.
- Creativity: The work must exhibit at least a minimal level of creativity.
The IPC Court’s holdings in the second-instance judgment indicated that:
- A compilation work is protected by copyright only if its selection and arrangement of data exhibit creativity, reflecting the author’s individuality. Mere effort or investment of time and resources does not qualify a work for protection if originality is absent. In other words, the sweat-of-the-brow doctrine should not be adopted.
- The database in question contained fields such as “Community No.,” “AI Address Recognition,” and “Property Type.” Except for the “Community No.” field, all data were already available in public databases and real estate websites, lacking unique creativity, and the “Community No.” field merely shows serial numbers assigned by the complainant and neither holds creativity. There was no evidence that the complainant’s program applied any unique classification or arrangement logic. Even if others used the complainant’s patented method, the resulting databases would be largely similar.
- Additionally, similar real estate databases had existed before, further demonstrating that the complainant’s work through the patented method was neither original nor independently created and, thus, lacked the required originality for copyright protection.
In the second-instance, the Prosecutors filed an additional charge, arguing that the defendant’s large-scale data extraction from the complainant’s website using a web crawler constituted a Criminal Code offense against computer security.
However, the court found that the defendant had merely used a self-written computer program (i.e. the crawler) to automate the downloading process by simulating human browsing behavior. The defendant did not bypass or compromise any security measures protecting the complainant’s system or use similar methods to invade the complainant’s computer. Moreover, the complainant had, in fact, allowed anyone to freely search and browse the data in its database.
As a result, the court ruled that the defendant did not commit the offenses of “unauthorized computer intrusion” or “unauthorized acquisition, deletion, or alteration of another’s computer records”, which are the two primary computer security offenses under Taiwan’s Criminal Code.
Since the charges filed by the Prosecutors carried a relatively low criminal penalty, the second-instance ruling of the IPC Court is not appealable. However, the case still raises several issues worthy of attention for the IP community:
[Terms of Use]
The judgments did not clarify whether the complainant’s database had explicit terms of use prohibiting large-scale data extraction via web crawlers or restricting commercial use of the data. However, the first-instance decision noted that the database provided free login accounts to users - such arrangements typically include terms of use. However, even if this database had such terms of use, their enforceability could still be subject to dispute, given that most of the content in the database originates from government public databases.
[Modifications to Photos]
The prosecutor’s indictment stated that the complainant’s database includes photos of buildings (sourced from other databases), and that these photos had been cropped and positionally adjusted, demonstrating the complainant’s creativity. The court did not explicitly address these manual modifications. However, its rejection of the sweat-of-the-brow doctrine suggests disagreement with the prosecutor’s argument. But what if the complainant had made substantial modifications to the photos? The outcome might have been less certain. Under Taiwan’s Copyright Act, an infringing derivative work may still qualify for copyright protection if it meets the minimum creativity threshold. However, how this rule applies in the context of database works remains an open question and is worth monitoring.