Lawsnote's web scraping program sentenced to 4 years + fines exceeding 100 million! Why does the founder lament that "doing startups in Taiwan is more pathetic than fraud"

Lawsnote was sued for infringement by legal database operator "Legal Source Information", and the first instance sentenced founder Guo Rongyan to 4 years in prison and Xie Fuya to 2 years in prison, and awarded civil damages of NT$154.5 million, why do we pay attention to this case? (Summary: Taiwan's first data crawler sentence" legal version of Google "Seven Laws Lawsnote" uses the source information of the method, and the 2 founders are rarely sentenced to 4 years + a fine of 100 million yuan) (Background supplement: The 26-year-old whistleblower who broke the news of OpenAI infringement committed suicide and accused the ChatGPT training model of violating US copyright law) Taiwan's legal technology circle exploded a shock bomb. After three years of attack and defense, the court sentenced founder Guo Rongyan to 4 years in prison and Xie Fuya to 2 years in prison on June 26, and awarded civil damages of NT$154.5 million. As soon as the news came out, the legal and new innovation circles were boiling, and public opinion also exploded, and this case was not only a simple copyright lawsuit, but also like a storm of judicial precedents that created the boundary between public information and innovation. Founder Guo Rongyan also confided his heart after the verdict, let's first look at the background of this case. Background of both companies, prosecution claims Seven Laws Founded in 2016, Lawsnote, a self-proclaimed "Google of the legal profession", is committed to using artificial intelligence and big data to improve the legal search and application experience, and its products cover free and subscription services, which are favored by young lawyers. Established in 1991, the legal source information that filed the complaint is a long-term contract for the construction of the government regulation system, including public resources such as the "National Law Database" and the "Judicial Yuan Judgment Inquiry System", and has played the role of "maintainer" of public department law information for many years. The company accused Seven Laws of using crawlers to automatically scrape hundreds of thousands of pieces of information from websites such as the "Law Source Legal Network", including legal history, content, attachments, and storing them in its own database for commercial use and profit. In 2021, the New Taipei District Prosecutor's Office raided and searched the cloud and hard disk of the Seven Laws and found up to 500,000 suspected infringing materials, and the prosecutor formally indicted in 2022, accusing the Seven Laws of committing the crime of remaking Article 91 of the Copyright Law, and invoking Article 359 of the Criminal Law for the crime of obstructing computer use (illegally obtaining electromagnetic records). The court held that: the legal history of the legal source and the editing of provisions have the nature of "editorial work" and are protected by copyright; The seven methods are obtained in large quantities by crawler means and stored internally, beyond "reasonable use"; Both the number of infringements and the commercial purpose make the circumstances significant. Therefore, the founder Guo Rongyan was sentenced to 4 years in prison and Xie Fuya was sentenced to 2 years in prison, and the company had to compensate the legal source of 154.5 million yuan and impose a fine of 1.5 million yuan. The first-instance verdict made the discussion explode, under the standard of automatic scraping of data by web crawlers, whether the regulatory data is "copyright-free" set off two views of the public, and the founder of the Seven Laws also expressed his voice on the evening of the 27th. Founder of the Seven Laws: What kind of law do we want? After the first-instance verdict was announced, Guo Rongyan, the founder of the Seven Laws, published a long article on the evening of June 27, deeply questioning the logic and social value of the court: "What kind of law do we want?" Guo pointed out that legal source information has long been a contractor of government law-related databases, many legal systems are maintained by the courts, and many government agencies must also operate and maintain through legal source companies when there are changes in laws and regulations. Qifa Company uses crawlers to grasp various regulatory information disclosed in Taiwan and cross-compare with each other to determine whether the content is correct. The source information was originally in the crawler crawling object, but later found that the words would be added indiscriminately, and the seven methods stopped crawling the content. Guo Rongyan regretted that the judge held that the use of crawlers to scrape the "public information of regulations" of the court company alone constituted Article 359 of the crime of obstructing the use of computers: obtaining electromagnetic records of other people's computers or their related equipment without reason. Faced with a heavy sentence of four years, Guo Rongyan bluntly said that he felt very ridiculous, because this verdict brought out two conclusions: The use of crawlers to crawl data may violate the crime of obstructing computer use The legal source owns the copyright of the national legal database "legal content", "legal history" and "legal annexes" Guo Rongyan said: "The government's national legal database and the legal source legal network data are the same, but the copyright belongs to the legal source information? The court of this case held that web crawlers may constitute the crime of obstructing the use of computers, which means that all crawlers may violate the law in the future, and even everyone's act of copying and pasting on the network may be obtained by others for no reason!" He pointed out that most of the Taiwan government's regulatory information is still highly dependent on the maintenance of specific manufacturers such as legal sources, which are long-term bidders of government bids, and its "regulatory platform" and "government database" are almost the same, but the court found that it owns all copyrights, which is tantamount to "privatizing" public legal information. What is even more shocking is that the court cited Article 359 of the Criminal Law, which regarded crawlers on automated copying and pasting as "obtaining computer electromagnetic records for no reason", making the use of crawlers a potential crime. He sighed: "Reality slapped me hard, gave me a heavy sentence of four years, and compensated 100 million yuan, only then did I understand that establishing a start-up in Taiwan is sadder than a fraud syndicate." This remark sparked heated discussions on the Internet, some people were angry, some people were angry, and some people formed solidarity associations. Proponents argue that the materials used in dispute under the Seven Laws are in the "public domain" and should be freely accessed by the whole people, not monopolized by a few manufacturers. Is copying and pasting illegal? The case has aroused the attention and debate of legal, scientific and technological, and start-up practitioners in just two days, and many of them have launched solidarity and set up support websites to call on all walks of life. Proponents believe that the law should protect the rights and interests of creators, and at the same time encourage innovative use of public materials (such as laws and regulations in the case), and that in the current rapid advancement of information technology, the judiciary should have clear and reasonable "guidelines for the use of public information" to avoid new creations stepping into a vague area and being severely punished. This case extends to the current copyright legal problems encountered by many information technology companies due to the use of automated procedures and AI models, and it is indeed worth thinking about and promoting the legislative needs of the whole people at a time when Taiwan has not yet kept pace with the pace of amending the law and creating new laws and special laws. Although the first instance is not a final ruling, its impact has long gone beyond the law itself. This copyright judgment controversy has opened up the contemporary core question facing data ownership in Taiwanese society: Is the value of the law to protect vested interests while preserving room for innovation? Not to mention that crawlers are very old program technology, in the face of the AI generation, if the law still measures data, writings and creations with outdated tools and concepts, then Taiwan's next new creation similar to the Seven Laws may not choose to be born here. Related reports BBC wars "AI to scrape news"! Search for startups on the court Perplexity a16z teaches you: the winning strategy of startups to "build a successful community from scratch" Build the next generation of blockchain payments! Mastercard cooperates with 5 payment startups, tests stablecoins, CBDCs, and tokenized deposits 〈Lawsnote crawler sentenced to 4 years + fine exceeded 100 million! Why the founder sighs that "doing new creations in Taiwan is sadder than fraud"" This article was first published in BlockTempo's "Dynamic Trend - The Most Influential Blockchain News Media".