South Korea
AI behavior law: bot and agent disclosure, crawler and training-data rules, automated-agent transactions, and algorithmic decision-making.
Summary
South Korea presents the highest risk among developed economies for commercial scraping. The Supreme Court (2021Do1533, 2022) held that scraping a public site without a technical barrier is not per se illegal, but the ICNA Art. 48 information-protection provisions and the 2024 amendment (Art. 48(4) prohibiting tools designed to bypass security/authentication) create broad criminal exposure for authenticated or semi-restricted crawling. PIPA is among the world's strictest privacy laws, covering public personal data with no broad 'publicly available' exemption. The Unfair Competition Prevention Act's catch-all Art. 2(1)(파목) (misappropriation of business outcomes, 2021) is the most powerful residual commercial-scraping tool available to Korean plaintiffs. AI-framework TDM legislation was pending as of mid-2025.
Automated-access legality
Carried forward from the crawler-law index. Governs whether automated clients may access public websites in this jurisdiction.
| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Authorization test | broad criminal |
| Public-page carve-out | yes |
| Terms-of-service browsewrap enforceable | notice dependent |
| Terms-of-service clickwrap enforceable | yes |
| Copyright exception model | fair use |
| Text and data mining — commercial status | unsettled |
| Text and data mining — opt-out mechanism | none |
| robots.txt legal weight | non binding notice |
| AI training-specific law | pending |
| Privacy regime | PIPA |
| Trespass to chattels | not recognized |
Last reviewed: 2026-05-21. Confidence: medium. Fast-moving area — verify before relying. Not legal advice.