Filed under employee-departure
Every brief tagged "employee-departure".
- § 01 · TRADE-SECRETS
When You Cannot Compare the Code: The SPC's RMB 166 Million Centrifuge Case and How to Prove Data Misappropriation Without the Defendant's Data
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.