Jinka Loses Second Scraping Appeal as Leboncoin Wins €250,000

French property app Jinka has been ordered to pay €250,000 to Leboncoin by the Versailles Court of Appeal, the aggregator's second courtroom defeat against a major French portal in four months.

The April 14th ruling covered €200,000 in damages and around €53,000 in legal costs. That's five times the €50,000 Jinka was ordered to pay Leboncoin as a result of the original legal case back in May 2024. Judges found that parent company Babel France had extracted and reused substantial parts of Leboncoin's listings database, in breach of EU database producer rights.

The decision follows a similar outcome in December 2025, when the same court ordered Jinka to pay €60,000 to Digital Classifieds France, the Aviv Group subsidiary behind SeLoger, Logic-Immo and Belles Demeures. Between the two cases, Jinka is now on the hook for almost €310,000 for scraping and reproducing listings without consent.

Founded in 2020 and claiming four million users drawn from more than 5,000 sources, Jinka has cast the judgments as a digital sovereignty issue rather than an IP one. Writing on LinkedIn the day after the verdict, CEO Marc Lebel pointed to Leboncoin's own AI deals: "30 years on, Leboncoin opens the entirety of its 89 million listings to ChatGPT but refuses it to French players like Jinka."

Lebel, who is weighing a Court of Cassation appeal, says the company's balance sheet can absorb the blow. He reports 65% year-on-year revenue growth for early 2026 and is pressing lawmakers to revisit the 1996 EU database directive cited in both rulings.

The French pattern sits oddly alongside a ruling in Hungary last year, where the Budapest regional court of appeal sided with aggregator Reálmonitor against market leader Ingatlan.com. That court accepted Reálmonitor's funnel-back model complied with the same EU database directive.