Plagiarism software constitutes unfair competition, Tencent wins lawsuit through creative rights protection
[4] Compiled from: Red Star News
Recently, the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court published typical intellectual property civil and administrative cases of Shenzhen courts in 2021 on its official WeChat public account.
Among them, the unfair competition dispute case between Shenzhen Tencent Computer System Co., Ltd. and Tencent Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter collectively referred to as "Tencent") and Shanghai Xinchai Network Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Xinchai Company") was included as a typical case.
Case review
Xinchai Company was established in September 2018, and its WeChat public account "Youzhuan Self-Media Assistant" is its sole corporate business. This public account once published an article titled "Big News! The Explosive Article Center Feature is Online! Copying Articles and Creating 100,000+ Traffic Explosive Articles, So Easy!" to promote its "Explosive Article Center" feature, claiming it could collect popular articles from major platforms, synchronize real-time trending topics from various communities, and support one-click import of explosive articles from platforms for editing, "easily handling your article content." Not only did it directly copy others' explosive articles into the editor, but Youzhuan Self-Media Assistant also stated it could perform operations such as article content splicing, title modification, and swapping the beginning and ending paragraphs, "to reduce article repetition and increase article originality."
According to the court, Youzhuan Self-Media Assistant supported dozens of platforms, including Qiehao, and Tencent is the operator of the Qiehao one-stop content creation platform, where content on Qiehao is distributed to Tencent News, Tencent Video, Kuaibao, etc.
Based on the aforementioned features, Tencent filed a lawsuit against Xinchai Company, requesting the court to order Xinchai Company to submit financial records of profits from the relevant software and compensate for economic losses and reasonable维权 costs totaling 4.9 million yuan.
[1] Court Opinion
After trial, the court held that the Youzhuan Self-Media Assistant software service provided by Xinchai Company to users did not create new works but was essentially a disguised form of plagiarism of the original works, commonly known as "rewriting." This behavior constituted unfair competition.
Due to the severe subjective malice, large scale of infringement, and refusal to submit financial records of infringing profits by Xinchang Tea Company, the court fully supported Tencent's claim for compensation of 4.9 million yuan.
Anti-Unfair Competition Law
Article 2
Operators shall follow the principles of voluntariness, equality, fairness, and good faith, and comply with laws and commercial ethics in their production and business activities.
Unfair competition acts as referred to in this Law refer to acts by operators that, in their production and business activities, violate the provisions of this Law, disrupt market competition order, and harm the lawful rights and interests of other operators or consumers.
Operators as referred to in this Law mean natural persons, legal persons, and unincorporated organizations engaged in the production or sale of goods or provision of services (hereinafter goods include services).
[1] The author's perspective
As the author mentioned in other cases, determining plagiarism in copyright is no easy task. First, there is no fixed standard, and judgments rely on similarity comparisons at the judge's discretion. Second, with advanced technology, using software tools to "rewrite" content for pseudo-originality is effortless, making plagiarism more prevalent and infringement increasingly severe.
The reason this case became a classic is not only that the Anti-Unfair Competition Law compensated for the deficiencies of the Copyright Law, but also that it embodied the principle that technological neutrality cannot exempt all technology providers from liability for infringement.
The technology provided by the new tea company is clearly infringing, and its promotion and sale of this technology to users actually induces user infringement. It does not constitute technology neutrality and should bear corresponding legal liability.
Thus, the judgment in this case is significant for combating content rewriting at its source, preventing online service providers from maliciously providing rewriting software to users, regulating self-media creation, purifying the self-media platform ecosystem, protecting the legitimate rights of copyright holders, encouraging originality, and promoting the development and prosperity of China's cultural industry.
