Due to the vigorous development of Internet technology, today's society has entered an era of information explosion. There is almost no doubt that the business model of "collecting and organizing Internet data or websites, and to correspond with relevant information (such as restaurants, tourism, real estate, etc.) then present them to consumers for easy and convenient access, and earning advertising fees or profit sharing through advertising" has economic value. Therefore, if anyone collects and crawls the website data collected and organized by others, and use it as content of our own websites or APPs of the same type, does the collection and crawling constitute plagiarism of unfair competition? This should be examined in accordance with the Fair Trade Act.

 

In September 2022, the Fair Trade Commission (hereinafter referred to as the FTC) issued a decision of Gong-chu-zi No. 111070, which dealt with plagiarized information collected and organized by competitors' websites and APPs, and mixed them with the content of their own websites and APPs. The FTC concludes that such behavior constitutes the obvious unfair behavior of exploiting others' efforts in a way that affects the order of the transaction violating Article 25 of the Fair Trade Act and imposes a fine. The case is hereby briefly analyzed as follows:

 

 

The Fair Trade Act was enacted to maintain the order of trade and the interests of the consumers. Among them, Article 25 of the Fair Trade Act stipulates that "[i]n addition to what is provided for in this Act, no enterprise shall otherwise have any deceptive or obviously unfair conduct that is able to affect trading order." The term "obviously unfair" in this article can be referred to in the Fair Trade Commission's guidelines for handling cases in Article 25 of the Fair Trade Act (hereinafter referred to as the "Guidelines") refers to those who engage in a competition or business transaction in a manner that is obviously unfair. Examples of the type of behavior that is obviously unfair are as follows: exploiting the fruits of others' work. For instance, plagiarize the website information of other who has invested considerable amount of efforts on the website or database, and commingle with the content of one's own website or database in order to increase one's own trading opportunities."

 

In this case, the complainant, the operator of the "ifoodie.tw" website and the APP (hereinafter referred to as "ifoodie") claims that the food record information contained in it was authorized by the author of the food record and included by the staff who contacted and negotiated with the author, or submitted and included by bloggers themselves. After the articles are included, ifoodie will collect, organize, and edit them into structured data. This requires investing a lot of time, manpower, and money to maintain the data over a long period of time. The complainant believes that the respondent, the operator of the ''ihungrybear.com'' website and the APP (hereinafter referred to as the "ihungrybear") crawls, uses, and displays the website information of the complainant's without permission and reduces the commission of the restaurant and advertisers to promote their business via ifoodie, which violates Article 25 of the Fair Trade Act.

 

 

 

The FTC believes that there is a competitive relationship between the complainant and the respondent. Both parties provide websites and Apps with food reviews and restaurant information, combining restaurant information, maps, and mobile device positioning functions to provide users with the service of searching for nearby restaurants. There is also a function to rate and write reviews for restaurants, as well as providing hyperlinks to the food records article with the title and thumbnail of the restaurant information page. Furthermore, both parties are food websites and Apps, and the main business model is to monetize the collected Internet traffic, that is, to sell advertising space to restaurants or advertisers to earn advertising fees or to earn profits through advertising companies.

 

 

For Internet users, there are many articles on the Internet that provide restaurant information and record dining experiences. Even if they rely on search engines, users still need to check the content one by one according to the search results in order to learn about the correlation between the records and restaurants. The complainant, ifoodie manually screens or chooses from a submission system the food record articles on the Internet. After analyzing the articles and structuring the data with a program, they are compared with the ifoodie database. After sorting, the Internet links of each food record article are matched with the restaurant information in the ifoodie database, and manual inspection is used to ensure correctness. ifoodie provides users with convenient and complete restaurant information, so that users can click on the title of each food record and browse the pictures and texts while viewing the information in order to understand the experiences and evaluations of different writers. A certain amount of time and manpower is needed to achieve this, and it demonstrates that process to curate the website information requires considerable efforts and has certain economic value.

 

The respondent, ihungrybear, does not deny the information on its website is collected from the ifoodie domain and ifoodie's website on the Google Cloud Platform. But ihungrybear believes that it is collected from public information so it is not illegal nor is it plagiarism since it did not use food record content from other websites. The FTC believes that the respondent's behavior in this case is that, "ihungrybear plagiarized the internet links of the food record articles on the ifoodie website, and the plagiarized object was the result of ifoodie putting in considerable efforts to collect, sort, and classify into webpages containing restaurant information." The types of behavior that constitute the obviously unfairness disclosed by the above mentioned Guidelines are examples of "exploiting the fruits of others' work", "plagiarizing the website information of other who has invested considerable amount of efforts on the website or database and commingling with the content of one's own website or database." The behavior of ihungrybear is not justified, and has nothing to do with whether the content of ifoodie is public internet information.

 

The FTC believes that ihungrybear plagiarized the content of the competitor ifoodie's website and commingled it as the content of its own website and APP. By freeloading off ifoodie's efforts put into building and maintaining the website data, such that users who were originally attracted by the food records from ifoodie turn towards its website and APP, ihungrybear divided the network traffic and download rate of the ifoodie website and APP. In addition, through the economic characteristics of the multilateral platform of food websites, the economic value and advertising revenue of ifoodie's advertising space is reduced, which creates unfair competition for ifoodie and other competitors who rely on their own efforts and legitimate methods to enrich their websites and APPs. Therefore, ihungrybear's behavior is obviously deemed as unfair and apparently affecting the trading order.