Yanolja wins suit against rival over data theft

Accommodation booking app Yanolja won a compensation suit it filed against a local rival for stealing confidential company information, according to a regional court Monday.

The Seoul Central District Court ordered Good Choice Company, the firm behind the accommodation booking platform of the same name, to pay 1 billion won ($852,300) to Yanolja as compensation for its theft of Yanolja’s business data.

The court said Good Choice gained profit from using information gathered from Yanolja and applied it to their service operations.

Yanolja filed the suit in 2018, seeking 2 billion won in compensation, alleging that GCC stole a massive amount of its data on accommodation partners from a computer server in 2016.

According to the court, the head of sales strategy at Good Choice requested a company programmer develop a program that could gather service operation data from their rival, including lists of their accommodation partners, addresses and sales prices.

The programmer copied the information without permission from January to October in 2016, the court found.

The information leak had taken away time and resources from Yanolja and can harm its competitiveness, the court said.

The court also dismissed GCC’s claim that the act of collecting information is common and legal, saying that changing the server address to access the data every time Yanolja blocked one shows that GCC was aware that the action was illegal.

The court also prohibited GCC from duplicating, distributing, transferring, selling and storing the data it took from Yanolja.

By Jo He-rim (herim@heraldcorp.com)