Lawsnote founders given severe sentence for using web crawlers to scrape Lawbank’s data

　Lawbank, one of the most prominent law databank in Taiwan, filed a complaint against Lawsnote for copyright infringement by using web crawler to scrape and extract the legislative history, laws contents, and related attachments created and compiled by Lawbank and then storing such data in Lawsnote’s database for paid search services.  The New Taipei District Court found Lawsnote’s two co-founders, Guo and Hsieh, guilty of violation of Copyright Act and sentenced them each to 4-year and 2-year imprisonment and also ordered that Guo and Hsieh and Lawsnote should jointly and severally pay to Lawbank TWD105.45 million in damages.  

　Established in 1991, Lawbank has built and developed its legal search system by establishing its legal database and has partnered with numerous judicial agencies and private enterprises.  On the other hand, Lawsnote, founded in 2016, had operated under its brand name, “Lawsnote 七法” to provide paid legal information search services.  

　In 2021, Lawbank filed a complaint against Lawsnote after discovering that Lawsnote reproduced from its database the bulk data containing the legislative history, laws contents, and related attachments compiled by Lawbank, which constituted copyright infringement.  In August 2021, the New Taipei District Prosecutors Office conducted a search and seized Lawsnote’s personnel and financial information, notebooks, and also relevant electronic files stored in Lawsnote’s cloud system.  Lawsnote argued that the data is government-issued public data and amounts to public goods free of copyright issues.  The prosecutor, however, found that Lawsnote had used web crawling system to automatically search and download data from Lawbank’s database and also reproduced the data of Lawbank’s legislative history into its own servers, making them available to its customers through both paid and free services.  The prosecutor ruled that such conduct has constituted the offense of “infringing on the economic rights of another person by means of reproducing his/her work without authorization with the intent to sell” as defined by the Copyright Act of Taiwan and also the offense of “obtaining, without reason, the magnetic record of another’s computer” under the Criminal Code.  Therefore, the prosecutor indicted Lawsnote’s two co-founders in August 2022.  

　After trial, the New Taipei District Court ruled that the “legislative history” data provided on Lawbank’s platform qualifies as “compilation works” as defined by the 1^st paragraph, Article 7 of the Copyright Act and hence should be protected as independent works.  Moreover, the Court also found that Lawsnote plagiarized Lawbank’s copyrighted materials for commercial gains, and therefore, imposed heavy sentences on its two co-founders and awarded Lawbank the damages in a full amount sought without any reduction.  (Released 2025.06.26)  
 /CCS