South Korean tech giants Naver and Kakao have come under fire from smaller local tech companies after claims of plagiarising.
The chief of Nara Infotech Co, a Korean spellcheck program developer, has claimed that a programme that took his company over a quarter of a century to develop, has simply been lifted and copied by both Naver and Kakao.
Kwon Hyuk-chul said on Facebook that “Naver released its own Korean spellcheck program, which functioned extremely similarly to our program”, following which Kakao's Daum portal did the same “and even made its 'application program interface' public”.
Both companies have denied the allegations with Kakao claiming that their programme was developed in 2014, and “did not utilize any form of reverse engineering”.
