Filed under data-property-rights
Every brief tagged "data-property-rights".
- § 13 · DATA-PLEDGE-FINANCING
Data Pledge Financing in China: What Is Actually Being Pledged, and Where the Law Gets Stuck
As Chinese banks and data exchanges experiment with data pledge financing (数据质押融资), a threshold question remains unresolved: what, legally, is being pledged? Chen Yiqian of Shenzhen Data Exchange walks through the two available routes under the Civil Code — chattel pledge (动产质权) and rights pledge (权利质权) — and the three operational problems that make chattel pledge difficult and the two doctrinal barriers that make rights pledge harder still. The analysis converges on a practical conclusion: chattel pledge via a third-party data custodian is the most workable path today, while data property rights and data intellectual-property rights both remain insufficiently legalised to support a reliable pledge. For overseas counsel advising on China data-asset financing, the gap between policy ambition and legal infrastructure is the central risk to price. Connects to the broader data property-rights registration project and the unresolved question of how data enters corporate balance sheets.
- § 14 · JUDICIAL
Datatang v. Yinmu — China's First Ruling on a Data-IP Registration Certificate, and Why Open-Sourced Data Is Still Protected
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.'
- § 15 · DATA-PROPERTY-RIGHTS
The 'Rights Block' — Xu Ke's Structural Theory Behind China's Data-Property Framework
Xu Ke's highly-cited (255×) 政法论坛 article on the structure of data rights — the theoretical scaffolding that the Data 20 Articles' three-rights framework rests on. He maps the field's two warring paradigms (formalist 'empowerment' vs substantivist 'conduct regulation'), argues both fail alone, and integrates them via a 'reflexive law' approach. The payoff is a taxonomy of three possible rights structures — rights-ball, rights-bundle, rights-block — and the case that the 'data rights block' (数据权利块) best fits data's 'one principle, many manifestations' character. For overseas counsel, this is the conceptual map that explains why Chinese data rights are structured the way they are — and why Western property and IP analogies keep failing.
- § 16 · DATA-ASSET
When Does Data Become an Asset? Xu Ke on Identifying and Defining Data Assets
Xu Ke (UIBE), writing for a practitioner audience, draws the line between data resource (国家视角, public/strategic) and data asset (市场主体视角, commercial), then between the broad sense (anything that creates value for the enterprise) and the narrow sense (meets the MOF accounting-standard test for on-balance-sheet recognition — owned/controlled, generates economic benefit, reliably measurable). He works the three-rights framework into operational boundaries by data type (personal / enterprise / government) and flags the practical questions overseas counsel face when a Chinese counterparty wants to put data on its balance sheet.
- § 17 · DATA-PROPERTY-RIGHTS
Wang Nian — Data Source's Rights as a 'Fair Use' Right Alongside the Three Rights
Wang Nian (Tsinghua Law) takes on the unresolved fourth-right question in the Data 20 Articles framework: what is the data source's right (数据来源者权), and how does it relate to the three rights (hold/use/operate)? Drawing on the 'data symbiosis' (数据共生) framework from the ALI-ELI Data Economy Principles and the EU Data Act, Wang argues that pre-existing legal entitlements — privacy, PI rights, IP, trade secrets — cover only part of the source's interest, leaving a residual that needs an independent legal protection. He frames the data-source right as a 'fair use right' (公平使用权): a contractual-relationship right against the specific data processor, distinct from the property-style three rights, that captures the value contribution of the source's participation in data co-creation. The corporate-data-portability analog DCC flagged in our NDA brief gets its doctrinal foundation here.
- § 18 · DATA-PROPERTY-RIGHTS
NDA Explains the Three-Rights Framework — A Plain-Language Walk-Through from the Regulator Itself
The National Data Administration's official 政策解读 (policy interpretation) on the three-rights framework — the right to hold, the right to use, and the right to operate data — established by the Data 20 Articles. NDA walks through what each right means, illustrative scenarios (group-company data subsidiaries; hospital-pharma research pools; data-broker commission arrangements), how the rights relate to each other (independently severable; non-exclusive across parties for the same data), and why the structural-separation design was chosen over a unitary-ownership model. The clearest available statement of the regulator's own intent on the framework that anchors every downstream rule — data-resource registration, data-property-rights registration, FTZ data-circulation negative lists, on-floor / over-the-counter trading rules.