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§ 01 · COMPUTE-CENTERS
AnJie Broad partners Cai Hang and Yao Ting and associate Liu Zeqiang argue that the IDC-era compliance checklist no longer fits the AI compute center. Their thesis: one machine room now carries five regulatory identities at once — domestic IDC operator, cross-border AI service provider, service exporter under the Export Control Law, supplier of self-deployed model capability, and responsible entity for the agents it ships — each with its own logic, and each transmitting obligations to the others. The brief works through value-added telecom licensing (B11/B12), energy-conservation review and PUE caps, the continuing duties under the Regulation on Network Data Security Management (State Council Decree No. 790), the token-export exemptions in CAC Decree No. 16 and what they do not exempt, the territorial limits of the GenAI Interim Measures, the Export Control Law catch-all, the unsettled line between large-model filing (备案) and large-model registration (登记), open-weight license trigger clauses, and the criminal exposure that follows an agent's tool calls under Criminal Law Article 285.
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§ 02 · TRADE-SECRETS
AnJie Broad partner Li Yanying reads (2022)最高法知民终1592号, the 'centrifuge case' — selected as one of the SPC's 2025 typical anti-unfair-competition cases on 8 September 2025 — for what it teaches about the burden of proof when the misappropriated asset is data. The plaintiffs never obtained the defendants' software or dataset, never decompiled anything, and never ran a substantial-similarity comparison. Instead they exploited the input-output character of software: enter the claimed impeller basic-stage data into their own program along with performance figures taken from the defendants' published product literature, and the output matched. Under AUCL Article 39(2)(i) that was enough to shift the burden, and the defendants' refusal to permit on-site inspection or produce design files converted into an adverse inference. DCC adds the correction the commentary omits: the SPC did not protect the software as a trade secret at all — the plaintiffs failed to delimit its secret points, so it was rejected on the not-generally-known element, and only the dataset was protected. The software was the measuring instrument, not the asset. For overseas counsel holding datasets in China, this is the enforcement route that actually carries damages, and the case is a lesson in how to delimit a claim before you file.
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§ 03 · E-COMMERCE-LAW
On July 4, 2026, the State Administration for Market Regulation and the Ministry of Commerce released the Draft Amendment to the E-Commerce Law for public comment, with comments due August 4, 2026. The draft has 20 articles and, according to the official notice and Xinhua Q&A, moves in five directions: expanding the law's adjustment scope beyond platforms and in-platform operators to other platform-economy participants; strengthening the platform responsibility system with richer, more graduated regulatory tools; building an integrated supervision mechanism for cross-sector platform operations, including consistent online/offline business supervision and stronger department and central-local coordination; targeting prominent illegal conduct in e-commerce; and deepening open cooperation by aligning rules, regulation, management and standards with international practice, supporting industry self-discipline and orderly outbound expansion, and adding countermeasure tools to protect Chinese enterprises. DCC reads the amendment as an attempt to reposition the E-Commerce Law from a transaction/platform statute into a platform-economy governance statute, with operational implications for platform rulemaking, merchant and worker protection, consumer governance, data/network security clauses, competition compliance, and outbound platform expansion.
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§ 04 · DATA-ECONOMY
DCC's summary of an opinion piece by Li Yang (李扬), professor at China University of Political Science and Law, arguing that the whole project of 'data rights-confirmation' (数据确权) — and the data-IP registration pilots run under it — rests on a category error. In Chinese IP law, 'confirmation' (确权) is the authoritative validation of an already-existing right, and it presupposes three things data lacks: a determinate object, defined rights content, and clear boundaries. Civil Code Art. 127 only defers the question; 'data IP' is a policy concept, not a legal one; and data is co-produced by many parties, so registration proves who submitted data, not who owns it. Li Yang's sharpest move is the dynamic-object problem: registration regimes (real estate, IP, equity) require a persistently stable object, but data's value lives in continuous updating, so the data at registration is never the data in dispute — and blockchain/hash/timestamp '存证' only fix a historical snapshot, never the living data stream, confusing proof-of-existence with object-identification. He concludes that registration's real functions are evidentiary and publicity/transaction-support — not rights-confirmation — and that data governance should move from rights-confirmation to interest-protection, from static-rights thinking to dynamic-competition thinking, protecting commercial-data interests under Article 13 of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law. DCC's read for overseas counsel, against the data-IP registration regime and the Beijing Internet Court's first AUCL Article 13 ruling.
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§ 05 · ANTI-UNFAIR-COMPETITION
The Beijing Internet Court's 30 April 2026 judgment — the first published application of the data clause (Article 13) of the 2025-revised Anti-Unfair Competition Law, effective 15 October 2025 — turns on one threshold question: did the plaintiff platform 'lawfully hold' (合法持有) the scraped career data? DCC walks through exactly how the court got to 'yes', step by step: the data originated as personal information collected with user consent under the platform's Service Agreement and Privacy Policy (no unlawful processing on record); the operator's build-and-run investment aggregated scattered records into a dataset with standalone economic value; and that dataset is the foundational input for the platform's matching business and competitive advantage. From those three findings the court derives its operative definition — data lawfully collected/stored/used, formed through substantial investment, and capable of generating business benefit or competitive advantage — and holds that the defendant's crawler-and-resale scheme, circumventing login and access controls, was unfair competition (¥200,000 + ¥30,000-plus in costs). The brief then takes up the doctrinal question: does Article 13's 'lawfully held data' correspond to the 'right to hold data' (数据持有权) in the Data 20 Articles' three-rights framework? The answer is a functional yes — the court is enforcing the holding right's purely defensive content, exactly as Hong Yanqing's analysis predicted AUCL Article 13 would — but not a doctrinal one: it builds a competition-tort interest on investment and lawful sourcing, deliberately sidestepping any claim that data is a typed property right. DCC's case brief for overseas counsel, drawn against the earlier AUCL Article 2 general-clause data cases.
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§ 06 · AI-GOVERNANCE
China's first unfair-competition case over AI batch-ghostwritten 'seeding posts' (种草笔记 — the staged, first-person product-recommendation notes that drive discovery commerce on Xiaohongshu/RED). On appeal, the Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court ((2025) Zhe 01 Min Zhong No. 3998) held that the operators of an 'AI writing' tool ('AI写作鹅') that let users one-click-generate fake first-person Xiaohongshu notes — fabricating personal experiences and feelings — committed unfair competition under Article 2 (the general clause) of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law. The court built an explicit four-factor duty-of-care test for generative-AI providers (is it generative AI; does it target a specific scenario/another's product as its 'application layer'; is it directional and inducing; is it a paid, for-profit service), citing Articles 4(3), 5(1) and 22 of the Generative AI Services Interim Measures. Because the tool was named after Xiaohongshu, marketed to mass-produce on-brand 'seeding' copy, charged a membership fee, and shipped with no notice or reminder against the foreseeable misuse, the providers were at fault. The appeal court affirmed liability but cut damages from RMB 200,000 to RMB 100,000 on an 'inclusive and prudent' (包容审慎) view of AI, and reversed joint liability for the third defendant that merely hosted the download. DCC OCR'd the full judgment from the source images; this is our case brief for overseas counsel.
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§ 07 · JUDICIAL
A consolidated case study of 数据堂诉隐木科技 (Datatang v. Yinmu) — the Beijing IP Court's June 2024 appeal ruling, widely called China's first case on the evidentiary effect of a data-IP registration certificate. The dispute: Datatang built voice datasets for AI training, open-sourced some under a license; Yinmu took and redistributed them in the same data-services market. DCC synthesizes four commentaries (the case report, a Tsinghua analysis, and two Shenzhen Data Exchange DEXC+ deep-dives) into the four holdings that matter for overseas counsel: (1) a data-IP registration certificate is prima facie evidence of property-type interests and lawful sourcing — but not an absolute property right (property-rights-statutism); (2) open-sourced data, though neither trade secret nor copyrightable compilation, is protectable under the Anti-Unfair Competition Law's general clause; (3) the protection hierarchy (compilation work → trade secret → AUCL Art. 2); and (4) whether the taker honored the open-source license is the hinge for 'improper conduct.'